250 Words

The question keeps coming up: "How do you write a novel?"

The answer is, "One word at a time."

That, of course, is readily dismissed as a smartass answer—which it is—but it's not that far removed from the truth. One of the reasons I still like to compose rough drafts on a typewriter is that it gives me a better sense of word count. One page of manuscript-format typescript is 250 words, and if you're out to write a book, that's a good pace to begin with. Try to produce 250 words daily.

How much is that? Don't trust the word count function in Microsoft Word; it does not deliver an accurate count. Instead, observe:

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Another warm summer evening; another sheet of paper scrolled into the typewriter. The writer sat on the deck, listening to the drone of the neighbor's lawnmower and the erratic clatter of his old Olivetti as he covered the page with inky, marginally meaningful sympt--

"Symptoms," Davis completed. "You distinctly were going to write, 'symptoms.'"

"I meant symbols," O'Brien grumbled.

"Right," Davis said. "The subconscious never lies."

("Except when it does," O'Brien muttered.)

"Pure Freudian slippage. You were about to write 'symptoms.' Indicative of the diagnostic nature of your exigesis. You hope that your writing reveals information that can help to illuminate your anomie, your existential dilemma, your je ne sais quois."

"No," O'Brien answered. "I only did it to have an excuse to explore the following question. To wit, is it possible to fill an entire page with meaningless blather, and work towards my mandated minimum of two-hundred-and-fifty words daily, without actually saying a damned thing?"

Davis looked up from the page. "I believe so. We're already past the halfway mark."

"Dialog is so easy," O'Brien mused. "You don't even have to fill up entire lines. You can make an entire paragraph out of a single word."

"Oh?"

"Precisely."

"This is cheating, you know," Davis said, frowning. "No modern editor would let you get away with this in contemporary mainstream fiction."

O'Brien nodded. "Of course not. We've reached the end of the page and I still haven't mentioned my penis."

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There you go: 250 words. Write that much daily—write it every day—and in a year's time you'll have a full-length novel. That doesn't look so hard, does it?