How Fast Do I Write? · 1:05pm Feb 5th, 2016
(And while I'm at it, a small progress report.)
Other than "not fast enough," I don't really know.
Trying to measure writing speed is like trying to measure a cat: you've got a vague idea, but it won't stay still enough for a proper measurement.
Overall, I've written almost half a million words of finished stories (on and off of FIMfiction) since December-ish 2011. Worked out precisely, that amounts to 301 words per day, give or take a word. But 300 words a day isn't really my writing speed because over the last four-and-change years, there have been an awful lot of days where I haven't written a damned thing.
ADHD is a constant battle to stop my brain wasting time by haring down every tangent it dreams up, but at the same time, dreaming up tangents is a vital part of my creative process. So, if I'm writing for an hour, and I only spend ten minutes of it actually typing, it's impossible for me to tell how much of that is slacking off and how much of that is, well, thinky-writing.
I know that the most I've ever written in one day is 6000 words, so I kinda know my upper bound. BUT! That was stuff written from extensive notes. I make a shit ton of notes when I'm writing, mostly because of the aforementioned 'brain leaps off on tangents instead of remembering to keep going forward' thing, and sometimes the notes become so detailed that they're basically a first draft written in shorthand. Can I really count it as 6000 words a day if what I'm basically doing is very slightly developing a whole bunch of notes? Iunno.
The fact that it varies massively from story to story doesn't help. A Persimmon Spring took less than a day to write, start to end. I've had similarly short stories and chapters take weeks. Mental health, spare time, immediate distractions, story genre, story tone, style and perspective all play into it, but fuck if I know which things are more important.
I think this is all part of the reason that word targets like 'write 1000 words every day!' annoy me and never really stick. Like, for one thing, going from nothing to 1000 words of real, actual fic can easily take four hours for me. Sometimes it's less! Sometimes it's much faster! But it's real easy for me to get back from work in the morning, waaaay oversleep, and whoops, I literally don't have four hours between waking up and going to work!
It's for exactly that reason I've usually set my target for about 500 per day when I do it, and another thing that really helps is saying "Okay, it doesn't have to be finished fic, notes count, possibilities count, basically anything I think up and type counts towards my wordcount," but then... does that method actually lead to more fic written? It's all very well to boost my wordcount up to 7k per week, and then find that this only translates to 2k of publishable work.
I'm hopefully getting some new ADHD meds late february, so I'll see if that makes any change. Until then, I'll get back to work.
Now, the progress report: 9000/11000 words done for Boneywing's Pipsqueak's Day Off spinoff commission, and NotWorthy's 6000 word ZecoraBloom piece is several verses of rhyme away from being finished. I'll hopefully have one finished by the weekend.
The thing about that sort of word goals, I believe, is that it's directed towards one really specific kind of writer, so for the rest is pretty useless. I've always heard that James Joyce would count it as a good day's work if he typed one entire sentence he was happy with in the span of one day -- I'm pretty sure he would have scoffed at the 1k-words-a-day thing. Then again, Joyce scoffed at a lot of stuff.
Like, correct me if I'm wrong (although I'm sure I'm not, 'cause you mentioned this in a previous blog), but I'd say you're the kind of writer who goes over everything he writes a thousand times while writing. So at the end of the day, you might end up with like 300 words or so, but those are some damn good 300 words. You make sure that the product is near perfect by the time you're done, or at least try to. Judging by the quality of your work, you pretty much nail that part, IMO, even if it takes you a little time to get there.
On the other hand, you have motherfuckers like me, who just puke every word that comes to mind and bother about editing later. I don't go as far as skipping scenes to write them later (I like to write everything in chronological order, because I don't take notes or plan my stuff really carefully, so I need to re-read the story now and then and it's easier to remember what I was going for later), and I can get -- and I have got -- stuck in a particular part? But if I'm unhappy with a sentence or a particular punchline, I just keep writing and think about editing later.
So as a result I end up with a fuckton of words, but they have to get edited as hell, and that usually means that I write everything twice at least, and usually three times or so, and this is before the editors even appear. The result can be exhausting and frustrating, but I guess it gives you more leeway. My record is writing 11,000 words in one go (although I recycled some material that I never got to publish, so the actual number of original words is around 10k or lower), and when I'm in the zone I can easily reach the 5k mark without really suffering that much.
But the quality is... Well. It's readable, which I guess is not a bad thing, but yeah. You go for quality, I go for quantity. I write more words, you write better words. I wouldn't say that's a bad trade-off!
So for me, writing 1k words a day minimum is a good goal, because it forces me to write every day (which is something I sometimes struggle with), but for you I think that making any progress (including writing notes, planning the next step of the story, or doing some changes that in your opinion boosts the quality of the story) is as good a goal as mine -- probably better. It's about writing methods, really. Because this:
Tends to be exactly what happens to me. I once spent two weeks trapped in a cycle of "write 5k -- go to sleep -- wake up -- delete those 5k -- write new 5k -- repeat", because a scene wouldn't come, and I plain didn't stop to fucking think about what to write before getting at it. Eventually I sorted it out, but man, was that useless. Word goals sound good, but they only work if you have a very specific method. Otherwise, to hell with them; they're nothing but a really neat method to wright you down.
3734504
You're an excellent editor in that case, I've always found your work to be very compact. I've never once read one of your scenes and said 'OH MY GOD JUST MOVE THIS THING ALONG ALREADY'
3734581
Heh. You should have seen "I don't want to write this" before I yelled at him. What you see as the final product is quite literally half-to-three-quarters what was initially there.
ILY Aragon I'll stop badmouthing you in front of your heroes from now on.
I do the same -- last year I wrote about 120,000 words too, give or take, funnily enough, which is also about a wordcount of 300 per day by my off-the-top-of-head -- and I have a very firm opinion on it.
I wrote 6-8K words of Mare who Once Lived on the Moon a day while I was initially writing it because of this. An initial 15 pages of so were just notes while I got the entirety of it out of my head onto a page. Directions, intentions, themes, moods, tones, everything I could in a scrambled, tangled web of treatment.
As a result, I haven't once had writer's block working on it. Depression, aggravation and real-life issues affect me in a very similar way ADHD, I imagine, effects you -- we both find it hard to sit down and work on something because our brains suck -- but I would absolutely count planning and preparation as words written. It makes your final product better, neater and tighter, and it makes it a lot faster and easier to write what you've got in your head. It helps you keep your own ideas straight later.
It's not a waste of wordcount, a platitude you pay to yourself because it's easier to do some days. It's an investment that pays off dividends when you make a harder thing easier on a day you wouldn't otherwise have been able to write the scene, and you write a better scene for it.
EDIT: I continue to only use myself as an example because I am the only person I can profess to know well.
SECOND EDIT:
I made that a promise as a Patreon reward threshold. I also don't have a job. These two things are directly related.
Dude you're helping Not Worthy out? I can dig it.
excellent, shale I send
the souls of the lost and dispossessedmy first half of payment foryour first born daughtermy first of 3 fics?I think that writing speed is partially a factor of what you count as writing speed. Like, if I write something, then write a second draft the next day from scratch, did I write X many words for two days in a row? Or did I write 0 words on the first day? Or did I write half and half?
Depends on how you count.
I think the 1,000 words a day thing is to encourage people to get something substantial done every day so that it becomes a habit.
Eh, I'm a lazy shitfuck when it comes to writing, these
daysyears. But I could write 1000 words a day. The reason I don't is because it would be garbage. I'm a perfectionist, and while I certainly don't expect to get a story or chapter 100% right on the first pass, I damn well do expect to write something worthy of at least the chance of being part of the finished product.Besides, I think the real issue is not that we don't write, it's that we would write if we felt like it. So really, the bigger issue is why we don't write. Usually I say it's situational. Or environmental. Like right now, I don't feel like writing because I worked my ass off today, and now I just want to kick back and watch some thoughtless time-wasting tv show or movie while I stuff my face with pasta and those tiny little waxy chocolate donuts. They're so bad, but so good.
What ADHD medication were you on and are switching to? In college I was on ridiculously high levels of Concerta and it fucked me up. Now I'm on an as needed basis much lower levels of a generic for it. it does help a lot both in writing and the real world, but I've learned it's better if I only take the pills during the day to try to get stuff done, because if I take them at night, I just end up masturbating the whole night and then feeling like shit the next day.
I've told people for ages that I can type 120 words per minute and write 600 words per hour.
(Those are both a little optimistic, but it doesn't matter how exact it is, it's still Truth.)
600/hour presupposes a good day of writing. It takes me a long time to spin up to speed, so usually my progress is negligible unless I can get at least a two-hour block of time set aside. That's why I'm so grateful to the Writeoffs: if it didn't force me to block off an entire weekend with no other obligations, I don't know when I'd actually get the writing done.