Writing is often measured in words.
This is understandable.
Words can be counted.
They sit politely on the page and allow software to produce a number at the bottom of the screen.
Numbers are comforting.
They suggest progress.
Unfortunately, writing has very little respect for comfort.
I have spent entire evenings producing three hundred words.
I have also written several thousand in a few hours and removed most of them the following morning.
According to the numbers, one of these days was productive.
I am no longer certain which one.
There are hours nobody sees.
An hour spent moving a conversation from one room to another because something about the original room felt wrong.
Two hours discovering that a character knows something they should not know yet.
An evening removing explanations that seemed necessary when they were written and unbearable when read aloud.
The word count goes backwards.
The book gets better.
This is difficult to explain to anyone who asks how the writing is going.
“Good,” I say.
“How much did you write?”
A dangerous question.
Sometimes the honest answer is:
“I changed a door.”
This does not sound like six hours of work.
The door knows otherwise.
There is a strange invisibility to creative work.
The reader sees the sentence that remained.
They do not see the twelve versions beneath it.
They see two people having a conversation in a café.
They do not see the hotel room, railway platform, park bench, and entirely unnecessary taxi where the conversation previously failed.
Good.
They should not.
The scaffolding is not the building.
Still, I think writers occasionally make the mistake of forgetting their own invisible hours.
We look at the page and count what survived.
Then wonder why we are tired.
The hours that produce the fewest words are sometimes the ones that save the book.
Not always.
Sometimes I have simply spent an evening being remarkably inefficient.
It is important not to romanticise everything.
But I am learning to recognise the difference.
There are days when the work moves forward.
There are days when it moves sideways.
And there are days when the most useful thing I can do is admit that something built three weeks ago is standing in the wrong place.
Then move it.
Carefully.
Usually after coffee.
The reader will never know.
That is rather the point.
— D. Vaen