First of all, remember Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of anything is crap. Originally developed for science fiction, the same law applies to all writing.<\/p>\n
I write a 2,500 word sermon three out of four weeks, along with a 250 word prayer and perhaps other incidental material for the worship service. I write a 700 word column for the church newsletter every two weeks. I write another 1,500 words of reports each month. So as a minister, I write nearly 11,500 words a month, ten months a year — or 115,000 words a year.<\/p>\n
Then for fun and relaxation I write this blog, for which I’ve been averaging about 500 words a day, or about 15,000 words a month. This month I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month, which should result in another 50,000 words (I’m already ahead of schedule — as of today, my official NaNoWriMo<\/a> word count stands at 12,589). In the last week of June, I wrote stories for the denominational Web site as part of the coverage of the annual denominational meeting, for a total of about 8,500 words. My total recreational output this year will be about 238,000 words.<\/p>\n Add recreational output to professional output, and you get over 350,000 words. Now apply Sturgeon’s Law, which predicts that I will write no more than 17,500 words that aren’t crap.<\/p>\n The problem is, how do I sift through all the crap to find the 17,500 words that aren’t<\/em> crap?<\/p>\n (244 words, not counting the title or this parenthetical note; of which 12.1 words are worth reading.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First of all, remember Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of anything is crap. Originally developed for science fiction, the same law applies to all writing. I write a 2,500 word sermon three out of four weeks, along with a 250 word prayer and perhaps other incidental material for the worship service. I write a 700 word column […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-blogs","category-culture-sf-pulp-lit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}