Those words all add up...
Hark at me with my little Latin quotations. OK, maybe I did pack the subject in after my mock ‘O’ level because I knew I’d do pants in the final exam but I do remember a few bits. Amo-amas-amat and all that.
Nulla Dies Sine Linea. Not a day without a line. The writer’s motto. Another one is ‘a thousand words a day or die.’ Not mine. I’m more of your Oscar Wilde variety. ‘This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.’ I don’t do so little every day, obviously. Publishers tend not to publish books containing just a comma, more’s the pity. But today has been Wildeish. It shouldn’t have been. I had no commitments. No school visits. No shopping. No lunch with friends. No traumas to contend with. Nada. Today was a designated WRITING DAY. Today, I was going to write until the print on my keyboard wore off and my eyes crossed in the middle. And what happened? Check this out. Word count at 08.11: 6791. Word count at 08.55: 6779. See what I did there? I lost words. Lost them. That’s the opposite of gained them and therefore being nearer the end of the book. This is what I do, you see. Like Kurt Voneggut I’m a polisher. I can’t leave the words I’ve previously written alone until they’re polished just right. The trouble is I spent that much time polishing one bit I run out of energy for the next bit. Crazy. I wish I were more like Anne Fine. She just writes until the end then edits. It would be a lot simpler.
Still, I get there in the end. A quick glance at my bookshelf tells me that. I finish books. Not quickly. Not efficiently, time-wise. But I do finish them. ‘Write a page a day. It will add up,’ said Herman Woulk. My word count at 17.24? After breaks for coffee, a walk to the post office and butchers, a couple of phone calls, a ridiculous amount of times checking my emails? 7529. Not quite a thousand but more than a line. Time to hoick out those commas, methinks…