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[political commentary]Sound like anyone we know?[/political commentary]
OK, thanks to everyone who responded to the great writing poll. I appreciate your input, and wanted to share the results we had.
We have 22 data points to work with -- not enough for statistical validity (that's the first caveat), but enough to make an interesting graph. The second caveat is that in a few cases I made 'executive decisions' as to what number to use, as in if someone said "I go between a 3 and a 5," I used "4". The third caveat is that each of the contributors judged their own 'scores,' so there is some inbuilt subjectivity. The fourth caveat is that I'm not a statistician (nor do I play one on TV) and so take anything I say with an entire shaker-full of salt. That said, here's what I came up with.
I made a chart based on the table I put together. Unpopulated, it looks like this:
Yep, it looks like one of those "personality" graphs so popular in corporate cultures. On the vertical axis, you have the speed of the first draft, with 'slower' being higher. On the horizontal axis, you have the amount of planning beforehand, going from less planning to more as we go from left to right. I divided the chart into four quadrants by the vertical and horizontal qualities: Fast & Loose (FL), Slow & Loose (SL), Slow & Tight (ST), Fast & Tight (FT).
And then I plunked in the data we collected. Without breaking it apart for "published" and "so-far-unpublished" writers, we get this chart...
I thought this was really interesting. First -- the big blue square is the average intersection point for all the data. I'm not sure how relevant that is, particularly, but... Each of the yellow squares is one person: how fast they produce their first draft on one axis, and how much they plan on the other, with the square marking the intersection of those two values. Where two people gave me the same values, I changed one of them by .05 points so that the squares would overlap slightly to show that I had more than one square there.
What I saw immediately, even with the first few responders (and why I asked for more data) was that one can see a nice little arc through the quadrants, one that starts low in the FL quadrant, slides upward through the SL quadrant, then sweeps over toward the northeast corner of the ST quadrant. Most noticeable is that, with the exception of one anomalous point, the arc utterly ignores the FT quadrant. Hmm....
Another very noticeable trait is that of the 22 data points, only four are on the right side of the chart. Another hmm....
The next step was to break the data into two series, one for those who have published/sold a novel, and another for those who have yet to break through. Here's that chart, with those who have been published remaining as yellow squares:
All the published authors, and all but one of those yet to be published fall within the curve, though only published authors inhabit the ST sector. Hmm....
I honestly expected the data to be all over the place with no discernible pattern. I was surprised to see the clustering, and I'd be curious if someone with access to more writers (and more time, and more experience with statistics) got a few hundred responses to see if the clustering continued. This is too little data from which to draw any valid conclusions, but it does lead to some interesting hypotheses, such as:
Novelists rarely-to-never do massive amounts of planning, then write their first draft very rapidly. That's one's almost counter-intuitive to me. You might think that if a writer expended much of his/her time into the planning process that the drafting process could be speedy. Evidently not -- at least not with our group. All the published authors who wrote their first draft rapidly also were 'loose' planners.
The majority of novelists are "loose" planners. Not all, certainly, but the majority. Again, only 18.2% of the respondents fell on the right "tighter planning" side of the graph, and of the published authors, those who were tight planners were also invariably "slow" drafters.
There is no right "speed" to produce your first draft. That value's all over the place, though the extremes of 1 and 10 are generally avoided.
The slower you draft your work, the more you tend to plan.. Again, that one's counter-intuitive, but if there really is a 'curve' here, that's what it implies: the slower you write that first draft, the more you also plan it out beforehand. Maybe there's some obsessive/compulsive thing going there?
There may not be a "right way to write" but there may be a "wrong" way. At least in the sense that we see no published writers in the FT quadrant at all. Let me restate the hypothesis less strongly: it might be that published writers have learned from experience that "Fast & Tight" is not a good strategy. That's hypothesis, of course, not fact.
Again, this is far too small a sample to produce anything but some guesses and speculations that more data might or might not support. It could be that the 'arc' I see would fall apart entirely if we had far more responses. Or it might actually tighten. Don't know.
But I thought it was an interesting little experiment. Thanks to everyone who participated!
OK, thanks to everyone who responded to the great writing poll. I appreciate your input, and wanted to share the results we had.
We have 22 data points to work with -- not enough for statistical validity (that's the first caveat), but enough to make an interesting graph. The second caveat is that in a few cases I made 'executive decisions' as to what number to use, as in if someone said "I go between a 3 and a 5," I used "4". The third caveat is that each of the contributors judged their own 'scores,' so there is some inbuilt subjectivity. The fourth caveat is that I'm not a statistician (nor do I play one on TV) and so take anything I say with an entire shaker-full of salt. That said, here's what I came up with.
I made a chart based on the table I put together. Unpopulated, it looks like this:
Yep, it looks like one of those "personality" graphs so popular in corporate cultures. On the vertical axis, you have the speed of the first draft, with 'slower' being higher. On the horizontal axis, you have the amount of planning beforehand, going from less planning to more as we go from left to right. I divided the chart into four quadrants by the vertical and horizontal qualities: Fast & Loose (FL), Slow & Loose (SL), Slow & Tight (ST), Fast & Tight (FT).
And then I plunked in the data we collected. Without breaking it apart for "published" and "so-far-unpublished" writers, we get this chart...
I thought this was really interesting. First -- the big blue square is the average intersection point for all the data. I'm not sure how relevant that is, particularly, but... Each of the yellow squares is one person: how fast they produce their first draft on one axis, and how much they plan on the other, with the square marking the intersection of those two values. Where two people gave me the same values, I changed one of them by .05 points so that the squares would overlap slightly to show that I had more than one square there.
What I saw immediately, even with the first few responders (and why I asked for more data) was that one can see a nice little arc through the quadrants, one that starts low in the FL quadrant, slides upward through the SL quadrant, then sweeps over toward the northeast corner of the ST quadrant. Most noticeable is that, with the exception of one anomalous point, the arc utterly ignores the FT quadrant. Hmm....
Another very noticeable trait is that of the 22 data points, only four are on the right side of the chart. Another hmm....
The next step was to break the data into two series, one for those who have published/sold a novel, and another for those who have yet to break through. Here's that chart, with those who have been published remaining as yellow squares:
All the published authors, and all but one of those yet to be published fall within the curve, though only published authors inhabit the ST sector. Hmm....
I honestly expected the data to be all over the place with no discernible pattern. I was surprised to see the clustering, and I'd be curious if someone with access to more writers (and more time, and more experience with statistics) got a few hundred responses to see if the clustering continued. This is too little data from which to draw any valid conclusions, but it does lead to some interesting hypotheses, such as:
Novelists rarely-to-never do massive amounts of planning, then write their first draft very rapidly. That's one's almost counter-intuitive to me. You might think that if a writer expended much of his/her time into the planning process that the drafting process could be speedy. Evidently not -- at least not with our group. All the published authors who wrote their first draft rapidly also were 'loose' planners.
The majority of novelists are "loose" planners. Not all, certainly, but the majority. Again, only 18.2% of the respondents fell on the right "tighter planning" side of the graph, and of the published authors, those who were tight planners were also invariably "slow" drafters.
There is no right "speed" to produce your first draft. That value's all over the place, though the extremes of 1 and 10 are generally avoided.
The slower you draft your work, the more you tend to plan.. Again, that one's counter-intuitive, but if there really is a 'curve' here, that's what it implies: the slower you write that first draft, the more you also plan it out beforehand. Maybe there's some obsessive/compulsive thing going there?
There may not be a "right way to write" but there may be a "wrong" way. At least in the sense that we see no published writers in the FT quadrant at all. Let me restate the hypothesis less strongly: it might be that published writers have learned from experience that "Fast & Tight" is not a good strategy. That's hypothesis, of course, not fact.
Again, this is far too small a sample to produce anything but some guesses and speculations that more data might or might not support. It could be that the 'arc' I see would fall apart entirely if we had far more responses. Or it might actually tighten. Don't know.
But I thought it was an interesting little experiment. Thanks to everyone who participated!
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