Update Feb 17th
I passed 50K words last night!
OK it was a Saturday, so I had more time than normal, so I put in about 5 hours… but I’m now past the 50,000 word mark! The story isn’t finished yet, and I recon it’s taken me about 57-60 hours so far… I’m not the worlds fastest typist and I’ve had to surf and Google for some information along the way, so I think my average typing speed on this has been about 1,000 words per hour. Average excluding hours of surfing, but including thinking time - working out plot while at the laptop etc. So if anyone reading this was to try the same thing, but with less free time, one thing I’d advise is to just forget about trying to get details correct in the first draft - just either make something up that works, or put a marker in there (e.g. ??? or >>>) so you can scan through later and fill in the gaps. Also you might try and leave a bit of timing leeway for things involving travel etc. in case you guess wrong (e.g. airline flights to a destination not running on the day you guess)
The reason I advise not looking up details at the time is that it’s much more important to keep the momentum going, as you really don’t want to loose the flow once you’re in your groove! I think I could have averaged maybe 1,250 or so words an hour if I hadn’t tried to get some details right and thereby interrupted my flow. Anyway, I just thought I’d have a little test run of typing at my personal ‘full speed’, so I’ve typed the bit below in a timed ten minutes… I got to 363 words (which includes numbers and mathematical signs, so call it 360 words, times 6 would be 2,160 per hour! Obviously it wouldn’t ever go at that speed for very long… but might reasonably even out to something like 1,500 words per hour - which would mean to do the NaNoWriMo challenge an experienced amateur typist might be able to do it in about 40 hours! So realistically, to do that you’d want to aim for ten to twelve hours a week (aim on the high side to always keep ahead of the average!) Or if you assumed a bit more at week ends, the daily target would be 60-90 minutes to get your daily 2K words done - again 2K being a bit higher than average to allow for the odd rest day, or having writer’s block - and I found that a round number was better than an overall average of 1,667 words per day. Obviously, the slower you type, the more hours it’d take.
Anyway, here’s my 363 word trial run, please forgive any bad grammar and lack of content!
This is a test of how fast I can type when I’m flowing well, without really thinking about things too much. It’s bad to let the flow be interrupted because it can lead to times where you don’t type at all!
And when that happened, every minute that goes by is one where maybe twenty words don’t get types… let’s see – how many words per minute is 1200 per hour… 1200 / 60 = 20 per minute… one every 3 seconds… but I’m really sure I can type a lot faster than that… not sure how fast I’m going now but it seems like maybe one word every second or so, which would be a total per hour of about 3600… and that would mean finishing a 50K book in about 15 hours… 36K + 18K = 54K And that would also mean that in my 60 hours, that I’ll pass today, then I could have written FOUR books!!!
Or, depending on how fast the editing stage goes, maybe written one, edited it a couple of times and sent it off with a covering letter, plus printed out the manuscript and a synopsis etc. all within the last two weeks!
OK so here I am just typing away without thinking too much about it, doing a very little bit of spelling corrections and formatting as I go along – can’t really leave spelling, as you might not remember what you wrote if you came back to it two weeks later… or maybe the grammar wouldn’t make sense?
Anyway, by not stopping to think more about this than I would if I was on full flow on a novel, I should get some idea of how fast it could go if I didn’t stop to check info as I went along!
I’ve been going for about eight minutes now, and the words are flowing quite freely, it almost feels like it has when I’ve been writing the novel in parts where I knew what to write and didn’t interrupt by looking any odd detail up, thereby disrupting the writing flow at the time.
Just time to finish this before the ten minutes test is up!
That’s all for today!
Cheers,
Andy.