Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I have been able to write drafts faster and with much higher quality than other writers I know. I have, unknowingly, been writing at “pulp speed.”

I stumbled across this concept of writing at pulp speed recently. It came from a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith. Back in the old days when writers banged out stuff on mechanical typewriters, there writers of pulp magazine articles and pulp novels who wrote ten novels a year along with a few dozen short stories at the same time.

Wow! How could anyone do that? Well the revision time alone would mean sleeping only 15 minutes a day. And then the review time. And then … and then … and then … NOTHING.

Writers who wrote at pulp speed simply pumped out the stories. They were story tellers. They didn’t know that the real work of writing was in the revising and all those things English teachers teach today.

Me? I took one composition class in college. Nothing in high school. My writing professor during that seven-week semester in the summer of 1976 assigned us to write in a journal notebook everyday—hence the name journal, which has something to do with a French word that has something to do with day. And we had to turn in one typed essay each Friday.

Just write.

Well, I guess I never learned anything since. I still just write. Along the way, I have picked up some rules about revising and such, but I haven’t been very good at applying the rules. I still mostly just write and then press the PUBLISH key on the keyboard. Most keyboards have this PUBLISH key, but most folks have never found it.

I recently interviewed for a job as a Technical Writer. The interviewer didn’t believe that I had written all the things I said I had written. I didn’t get the job. Oh well. I didn’t have some sort of writing certification. All my books, articles, posts, essays, and all that stuff didn’t count as a certification. Oh well.

A recent experiment showed that the dictation feature on that popular Word processor from Redmond, Washington is better now. I needn’t even use the keyboard and type words. I can sit in my Lazyboy chair and tell stories to the Word processor as if my grandchildren were sitting at my feet and listening attentively. I think that “grandchildren at the feet” thing is just a myth as I have four grandchildren and they never sit at my feet. Where’s the fireplace that is in all those Rockwell paintings? Huh? But I digress.

Can’t type? No need. Just dictate. Tell stories at pulp speed. It seems to work.

There may not be any money in this. There is no guarantee of money in any writing. But there is something in writing or telling stories or pretending that my grandchildren are sitting at my feet enthralled by my stories. Try it.