I write fast. In high school, I took a touch-typing class and I've benefited greatly from it. In some cases, though, I end up going too far in the opposite direction. Flight is a good example since I had to cut 90k words to get it to a more reasonable point. It also means I have a good rate of words (10k on a great night, 5k on a good night, 1k on a slow night). When I was working on DL/DL, and I had fantastic feedback, encouragement, and a drive to finish, I got up to 18-20k words/day. That happened to be my best story (I got fan art), but still, that wasn't common.

At the writing group, we got to talking about writing speed. And people were impressive at my speed, but I realize that they were getting hung up the number of words I write and not the quality. My speed has nothing to do with my quality of writing. I wouldn't be in the writing group if I could write high-speed, amazing words. :)

Writing 2k words/hour of crap just means I'm writing a lot of crap. My goal is to actually write less, but better stuff.

I got to thinking about this since I wanted to write a short story this weekend. The story I planned on writing--been planning for months--ended up going flat. I wrote the first thousand words three times over and just couldn't get anything that excited me. I gave up and decided to write an off-the-cuff story. 5.5k words later, I had something I was happy with.

It isn't a great story. It wasn't even a good story. I haven't written anything new in months because I was editing Flight. So, I was writing this story to create something, so its okay that it isn't a good story. I already know that the first story after a drought of writing is always lousy. The only thing I can do is keep writing until the "pipes run clear" again.

Related to that, I absolutely love finishing stories, even throwaway ones like these. They make me happy because I love creating things.