The Wonky and Technical Process of Writing a Book

The Wonky and Technical Process of Writing a Book

Republished in part from Medium.com

Asher Stephenson

By Asher Stephenson

Welcome to Wonky & Technical, a multipart multimedia project that explores the surprisingly technical side of creativity. In the first episode, I sit down with Dyrk Ashton to talk about fiction, spreadsheets, and the work that goes into making things feel right. In the first article (below), I take a deep dive into creative spreadsheets and how data organization can be a critical part of the creative process.

Writing is a strange beast.

Everyone writes. We text, we send postcards, and we write quarterly reports. We send an average of 205 billion emails per day, and we send those emails quickly and nigh constantly. Our world runs on writing things down.

At the same time, though, we’re spectacularly bad at it. Students struggle with basic essays, professionals can barely write a scope statement, HR departments terrorize entire buildings with feel-goody gibberish.

And fiction? Oh, fiction is a mess.

Pick up your favorite book. Grab some paper. Look for inconsistencies. Almost every popular series has at least one plot hole. The same goes for the classics. It’s ugly.

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The Hobbits didn’t give the ring to the Great Eagles, Harry Potter never abused time-turners, and for whatever reason the Bugger queens never moved off the home world. Indie books are lucky to hit the market without typos on the first page.

These huge errors aren’t common due to laziness, though; logistical error rates are high because humans are error-prone machines. As projects grow, error rates increase, and books are pretty damn big. Check the numbers.

The average book is 90,000 words long. If you’re a genre fiction junkie like me, the average word counts are even higher. Malazan and Wheel of Time both clock in around 3 million words. GOT sits, unfinished, at a cool 1.77 million. The web series Worm is an unbelievable 1.68 million words long, and Sanderson keeps throwing an integer overflow error.

In terms of man-hours, a single book can represent hundreds of hours. An entire series? Thousands. Even the most organized people around make big mistakes when they have that much rope to hang themselves with.

So why the hell is everyone so obsessed with creativity?

Read the rest of the story>