¶ Another cookie
I felt compelled to find a cartoon today. I first saw it a couple of years ago in my Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker set that Kate gave me for Christmas. Though it’s difficult to extract the cartoon from the CD, I did do a screenshot of it and now have it for my desktop pattern on my computer. I printed out a copy as well: I think I’ll put it on my office wall.
The cartoon was published on December 24, 2001. There are two people in the cartoon, a man sitting with a computer at his desk and a woman in the doorway, holding a mug of cocoa. The text at the bottom — neither character is obviously speaking as per most New Yorker cartoons — says, “I wrote another five hundred words. Can I have another cookie?” I searched online but couldn’t find a copy. You might have more luck searching yourself; I couldn’t tell you where to even start.
It’s funny for a number of reasons, but it is timely because I’m just six days away from my big NaNoWriMo start. If I eat a cookie every 500 words, I’ll be consuming a hundred cookies in a month. I guess that’s only about three a day: not bad. I can do 500 words without even waking up. Since I’ve been practicing my writing more, I can churn out five hundred words in only a few minutes, though the speed comes with a significant toll on the quality.
Actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Yes, but fast writing is distressingly crappy, but my slow writing isn’t really much better. When I write slowly, I tend to be even more awkward, more conscious of my own voice, and more likely to construct sentences that have no visible human logic. When I write fast and allow myself to relax, I write clean, honest prose. Yes, my paragraphs lack cohesion and I sometimes switch subjects even in the middle of a sentence (which brings its own kind of incoherence), overall, I think my fast writing might be better than my slow writing. I just have a hard time accepting that my slow writing is so bad.
Having the right tools makes a big difference. When I’m writing to reach a word count, I love the little bar-graph at the bottom of my window in Scrivener. With that little bar slowing growing, I can pace myself so that I reach some conclusion right about when I’m supposed to finish. I find it amazing that my brain can actually manage to do that so smoothly. Sometimes, of course, that same process is detrimental, but since I can turn it off, it isn’t really a problem. But for maximum cookie-age, knowing when I hit the critical five hundred word cut off is very important. In fact, when I’m looking forward to a cookie, I might stop writing mid-sentence, even if I haven’t finished my thought and the whole thing feels
25 October 2007
# Comment by Ellen Patton on Oct 25, 12:58 PM:
Sounds like you need a few bins of Trader Joe’s chocolate chip cookies!
# Comment by Carrie on Oct 29, 02:38 PM:
I love Anne Lamott’s injunction: Write [lousy] first drafts. Very helpful!