some dorky wordcount stats

[queenlua]

as an experiment, i tried tracking my word-count-per-hour carefully while writing the second chapter of summer is miles and miles away. here's some statistics, recorded here mostly for my own benefit / idle curiosity, but maybe it's interesting to someone else, idk:

* average writing speed: 310 words an hour
* total time spent writing this one: 30 hours. final wordcount ~9.5k
* lowlight: i had one 3hr session where i only got 289 words, partially because it was an absolutely brutal scene to write, and partially because i kept learning i needed to do more research aihgealigh
* other lowlight: had a stretch near the end where i was only hitting like, 150ish words per hour—but this makes sense; it was the scene i'd specifically put off writing because it was so tricky
* highlight: the scene i felt most certain/excited about came more quickly, obviously. but not astronomically faster! absolute max was 700ish words an hour, and most "good" days were closer to 500 words an hour

some more qualitative observations:
* it seems hard for me to work in chunks of time shorter than 2 hours, and 3 hours is ideal
* i had a vague awareness before this that i tend to "max out" at 1,000 words a day. i can see why—3hrs is a pretty long writing session, and if you spend any extra time doing edits or dithering or research, like, that's most of the "focused" spare time i'm going to have on any given weekday
* that being said, i did get a few days of higher wordcounts while writing this, but those were on weekends—one 3hr-ish session after i woke up, and another one late at night
* i did a little less editing-as-you-go than i normally do, but not much less.
* i also tracked my "planning" time, though, more loosely—since, like, obviously i think about whatever story i'm writing in all kinds of random moments, right, and i'm not tracking that. but i do tend to sit down with an outline for a few sessions, or try to figure out in advance what the highest-tension-scene is going to be, or whatever—and i do have to actually sit down to hash these out, or else i just avoid thinking about the hard stuff :P anyway, by this metric, i spent ~9.5 hours in just "thinking/outlining/researching time" before i wrote much
* by all these metrics i should theoretically be able to finish a 90k novel in like, 5 months, assuming ~15hrs/week of work, and uh, not getting owned at any point, haha
* i started outlining on may 9, started writing in earnest on may 16, finished a draft may 25
* i haven't done editing yet, obviously. for pieces of this length, generally, one full-day (8hrs-ish) editing session usually is "good enough" for me or whatever
* nanowrimo is like. never happening for me lol

Comments

[lassarina]

This is really interesting! I tend to splort a lot of words messy and fast and then go back to fix them later; I'm a fast writer but I leave a lot of [fix tricky scene here] and [idk stuff?] when I'm drafting, and then go back to fix the really messy stuff later. But I also tend to want to get the bones on the page fast and then go back, because it's how I don't lose momentum and get bogged down (a lesson learned hard a long time ago.)

I'm always so interested in how other writers work.

[queenlua]

i definitely also have a lot of "[stuff happens here]" and "Then Anthony rose and ____" in my drafts, lol. doesn't necessarily make me go any faster, but, yeah, it's absolutely about getting the bones down and—even moreso about the rhythm, actually. i've been thinking about this woolf quote, lately—my earliest drafts are totally nonsensical to anyone but me because i leave "___" for random sentences in the middle of the paragraph, and that's to indicate "there's a sentence here, but i don't know what that sentence is exactly yet, i just know what it should flow/feel like right now." like, ah, here's an example picked from my current WIP:

Claude waited for another question. But Rhea said nothing more, just stood ___. And the longer she stands there, the more he ___, the more the bow slung over his back feels ___. So he ___.

Rhea watches him as he readies himself to leave. Just watches, unobtrusive, ___. He keeps turning ___, because it feels like she’s about to say something, ___, but every time he turns ___.

[pause, Claude’s wyvern is ready to go]

“Rhea, you... How did you do it?”

i dunno if anyone else's drafts look like this? but it's how mine look lmao

[lassarina]

Oh, that's really interesting! I can't leave sentences unfinished like that generally because it will bug me too much, but placeholder scenes or sometimes paragraphs, I do. So I'll have something like 1100 words of a scene and then

[something? family dinner? show the connections between them, make them live]


Rarely in the middle of a paragraph I'll leave notes to myself: [is this how gaining access to a federal building works? Check with (name of a friend who'd know)]