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Scotty, we’re almost home – how many Decistevies can you give me?

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I’ve got this joke running with a couple of friends on Facebook – we’ve started using the term “Decistevie” as a measurement of writing in prose fiction. Steven King has repeatedly stated that he aims to produce 2,000 words of prose every day, which explains both how he is able to put out so many books and how some of them seem a little the-same-ish after awhile. So I started saying that 2,000 words in a day could be considered a “Stevie”. A Decistevie, then, would be 200 words – a non-trivial chunk of prose, but you’d feel pokey having only that to show for a day of work. A couple of years ago I considered it a good day if I wrote 600 words, which would count as 3 Decistevies – or, if we are using Star Trek syntax, which makes it more fun – cruising at Decistevie Factor 3.

Later I pressed myself to see 800 words as a satisfactory accomplishment, which meant I was cranking it up to 4 Decistevies. And more recently, I have noticed that without too much forcing, I am now regularly producing 900 words per working day when prose fiction is in the mix. Decistevie Factor 4.5. When people do NaNoWriMo – the challenge to produce a 50,000-word novel in a month – that’s a commitment to spending each of 30 days at over 7 Decistevies – a challenging pace for mere mortals.

This measurement is not as applicable to script-writing, blog posting, or other farting around on the internet. Goodness knows I’ve blogged well past a full Stevie at a single sitting on multiple occasions. I feel like, prose fiction being the medium of Stevie himself, it is most appropriately-applied to the customary density of that very specific medium. A lot more work goes into fewer words when screenwriting, for example.

One reason I like the Star Trek terminology is that if you try to write at too high a daily rate, not only do you risk damage to your engines, you can breach some kind of barrier beyond which nonsense and discord reign, or your characters start doing stupid sh*t like turn into salamanders like they did in that Voyager episode about Warp 10. As important as the ability to maintain productivity is the ability to shut down each day and say “I can stop here”.

Well, the rules shift a little as you get near to the end of something big, and so today I moved at a hair-raising velocity, beyond Decistevie Factor 9, all so I could announce that I have now completed Torpor – a 12,000-word novelette. First drafts are hairy, but I feel unusually-emboldened to say I am damn proud of this one. Feels like a step forward for me.


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