How long does it take you to reach 60k words?

Discussion in 'General Writing' started by bythegods, Jul 22, 2014.

  1. Nightstar99

    Nightstar99 Senior Member

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    In my memory everything I wrote was scintillating, moving and perfectly paced. Reading it back its not like that at all, and trying make what I did write to match even a shadow of what I remembered writing is just so disheartening. Probably a much needed dose of humility to be honest.

    Writing well is really, really, hard.
     
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  2. Mike Kobernus

    Mike Kobernus Senior Member

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    There are lots of factors that affect that kind of statistic. It really depends on scheduling, family life, work and whatnot.

    I have done it, twice, in less than three months, for completed first drafts of 75 and 98K respectively.

    But I did NOTHING else.

    However, I will not manage it on my third. It is already 2 months, and I have only 40K down, which sounds like I could manage 60K in only one more month, except now I am heavily into editing one of the previous books.

    My advice...don't sweat it...

    Your story should be as long as it needs to be, and it should take as long as it needs to take.
     
  3. Charisma

    Charisma Transposon Contributor

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    I do not mean to start a debate, but I feel your post is quite rude in the sense that not only are you assuming that 1 hour is enough for typing out 1k words, you are looking down upon people who don't. Like I said earlier, I've written a 120k words novel in 3 months and I'm still stuck with 95k on a novel for 5 years. You're right; if I just write everyday, without any break, writing a novel shouldnt be a challenge. But not only is that an inane assumption, it makes no sense. By typing speed, 1k words an hour are approximately 16 wpm, a fairly nominal speed, but you have not accounted for the time spent on research, creating the mood, going to back to what you just wrote, and what not. Unless one wants to ramble through their first draft, minor rewrites along the way are natural and not an obsession with a golden first draft.

    And seriously? If someone has priorities other than writing, does them make them less of a writer (I know you didn't say that, but it was implied). What one may overlook is that the time you spent at work, college or with family/friends is not just when you're physically with them--your thoughts stay with them longer, and that's why people bring work home or vice versa. Writers of all people, are not robots who can switch off their day-to-day life and get to writing. I may get my first draft when I can,and when I want to.

    Having said that, it is important to compartmentalise and prioritise. If you have a mission to get down your novel in a period of time, get down to it today; make yourself goals and stick to them. Set aside some mandatory time for writing. These are essentially lessons to avoid procrastination and get results, but this in itself does not make you more or less of a writer.
     
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  4. aikoaiko

    aikoaiko Senior Member

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    Very true, also.
     
  5. ToDandy

    ToDandy Senior Member

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    It really depends on how long I have to write. During my first NaNoWritMo, It took me about a month to hit 70K.

    But I haven't gone in for that big of a writing marathon in a while now. My current writing speed is about 25K a month on just my novel.

    So yeah....I'll have written my complete 3rd draft re-write over the course of about 3 months exactly.
     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2014
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  6. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Three months is a guideline, not a magic number. You might not get 1k words every hour. That's why you have weekends. You might find that some weeks you're not making the count, so it takes you four months instead of three. So what? The momentum is still there.
    This is based on the assumption that you write your first draft with a loose hand, and that you rely heavily on your 2nd, 3rd, 4th drafts to make the story high quality. Even with the minor rewrites during the first draft, I maintain it is possible to get ~1k words in an hour. If its not, there's always two hours.

    There are eighteen awake hours a day. One or two spent on writing is not unthinkable.

    "What one may overlook is that the time you spent at work, college or with family/friends is not just when you're physically with them--your thoughts stay with them longer, and that's why people bring work home or vice versa."
    I don't even know what to say to this. If all those things are a priority to you, and that includes thinking about them later...well, then yeah, I guess writing is not up there in your list of things to do. It is for King, and that's the audience he's writing for.

    The harsh reality is that to get good at something, it takes a lot of consistent work, at least for most of us. There's really not much more to say.
     
  7. Nightstar99

    Nightstar99 Senior Member

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    Shakespeare had 14 children or something, but I bet he got to write with no interruptions.
     
  8. Artist369

    Artist369 Active Member

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    I was just reading an article online by Randy Ingermanson about what he calls the snowflake method for writing fiction. He says it allows the average writer to go from 500 hours for writing a first draft down to 150 because you map out where the key points in the story need to be early on, then fill in the smaller details in between. Basically, it keeps you from wandering and wondering what comes next. Seems like an interesting method. I'll try it. Look him up online. It was a good read.

    Mind you I've only written a few things, but it took six months to write 100k the first time around and 6 months to write 65k this time around (from a character's POV who's very wordy and theatrical). I think my problem is, I spend too much time playing with word choice and sentence structure. If I just treated it like a first draft instead of a final draft, I'd probably be at the end by now.
     
  9. Charisma

    Charisma Transposon Contributor

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    I am not saying your technical assumption was wrong--well, I am, but that's hardly my point. My point being that feeling someone is somehow not a true writer (" I guess writing is not up there in your list of things to do") because they can't take out a set amount of daily, or because they do have priorities otherwise, is not fair at all.

    That's not the point. I already agreed with that; setting goals and following a schedule are work ethics that are important for getting anywhere in life.

    The original premise simply was how quickly you can produce a first draft is a predictor/criterion of your writing ability, or your success--both of which I did not agree with. Just because you can come up with 60k in 3 months, it doesn't mean you're a good writer, or you're be making big bucks soon.

    Consistent work can be defined as little as 15 minutes for a week, or 3 hours a day every week--there is of course a plateau at both extremes, where too sparse is useless and too frequent will produce much the same. So yes, if you're going to need a working time of, hypothetically, 3000 hours, to become an excellent writer, then the more time you spend in a day, the sooner you'll reach the goal. But that, in itself, does not mean that if you're spending lesser time, one is never going to reach the goal, or one will be a generic failure--consistency goes both ways.
     
  10. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    I am skeptical that 15 minutes a week would get you anywhere, even in 10 years. It's not simply cumulative. That's not how skill building works.
     
  11. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Stephen King used to write from his trailer, after working a full time teaching job. He also had a wife and kids. From his perspective, 3 months for a first draft is doable. I am of the same mind.

    4-6 months for a first draft? No biggie.

    What about 9 months? Sure.

    A year? OK.

    Two years? Three years? Never? It's a slippery slope. Nothing is written in stone, but I guarantee you there are people right now looking at my post and thinking, from their own experience, "yeah, he's right."
     
  12. jazzabel

    jazzabel Agent Provocateur Contributor

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    I have a lot of respect for King's commercial success, so I'm not saying he is a bad writer, but his books, especially last ten years (or twenty) are all in need of editing. And by that I mean chopping out pages of verbosity and unnecessary description and replacing it with genuine plot or characterisation. So I don't think that timescale works for him, let alone me.

    If I'm writing non-fiction, I can reach 60k words in a few months, maybe even a couple. Fiction goes a lot more slowly simply because it has to be filtered through my imagination, the entire world needs to be built from scratch, so the fastest I got to 60k was about eight to nine months. The finished draft was mostly ok, but needed refinement throughout, which took several passes, twice as long in total. I'm not saying mine isn't a snail's pace, maybe it's perfectly possible to have a good first draft in 3 months, but it seems awfully short time, especially if you factor in the research.
     
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  13. Mike Kobernus

    Mike Kobernus Senior Member

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    I would definitely say that three months is possible. Further, the snowflake method is, more or less, how I write. I simply do not call it that. I do not call it anything, since I had not heard of the snowflake method until a few seconds ago!

    But sketching out each chapter, with its main points, then breaking it down in to scenes, then filling in the key details, is the way I do it. Works like a charm.

    If you get stuck with something, and do not know how to proceed, just jump to another part of the story and work at that.

    I have heard that some writers start at the end.

    Mr King mentions, I believe, that he writes the first chapter last? (I think....its been a while since I read his book on writing...)
     
  14. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Part of it is how you define first draft. All the things you said King should have done in your first paragraph, could be done in 2nd, 3rd drafts. I agree the research adds another element. Considering that King advocates people read voraciously whenever they have time, research is probably not considered part of writing, but part of reading. Also, research is something that might be better saved for draft 2.
     
  15. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    This is a good point.

    I think King makes some assumptions (probably because he is a professional). He's assuming no writer's block, or whatever you want to call it. There are tricks to avoid stagnating and or being stuck in a novel. What they are is beyond the scope of this conversation. Suffice to say, they exist, and if used, make getting that first draft in a timely manner much more likely.


    As an aside, I don't like to take too long to get my first drafts out. My inspiration is not finite, and after a few months, I can really start to feel the tank getting empty. That's when I try to push myself close to the finish line, which usually gives me enough bonus inspiration to propel me to the end. But from my own personal inspiration, the probability of me not finishing a first draft dramatically increases with decrease in weekly word count. This does not seem to be the case for 2nd, 3rd, drafts, etc. By then, I have established a more permanent connection with the material.
     
  16. Charisma

    Charisma Transposon Contributor

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    It's something we'll just have to agree to disagree on.
     
  17. jazzabel

    jazzabel Agent Provocateur Contributor

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    True, but I wasn't referring to that being a part of first draft process. What I meant to say is, he's perhaps rushing it with his books anyway, and if his final product is anything to go by, he should spend more time on each stage, come up with better written books overall.

    Also, I couldn't leave research for draft 2. I write loads before I have what I think of as first draft, but most of the story should be there, subsequent drafts are more for style and prose then content.
     
    Last edited: Jul 24, 2014
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  18. JetBlackGT

    JetBlackGT Senior Member

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    It takes me twelve days to write that much based on my writing goals. Generally much less. My first book (126K) took 21 days to finish the first draft. The second was about 110K and took 14 days.

    My ex-girlfriend was unhappy about that kind of commitment to reaching my goals though. ;-)
     
  19. minstrel

    minstrel Leader of the Insquirrelgency Supporter Contributor

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    Thanks for pointing this out. There's a TON of work that goes by for me before there's something I call a draft. Piles of work. It isn't necessarily all prose intended to fit into the story somewhere, but I did it. I bust my ass to get to a first draft, and that's just step one to getting a finished story. (And that's the way I like it!)
     
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  20. bythegods

    bythegods Banned

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    Ok next question; How sloppy/perfect is your first draft? Is it mental dribble or do you put the effort into sentence-craft early on?
     
  21. Nightstar99

    Nightstar99 Senior Member

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    I write how it comes out and then cry about how bad it is after.
     
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  22. Amanda_Geisler

    Amanda_Geisler Senior Member

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    I've written approximately 150,000 words since the start of February, in two separate 1st drafts. This six months has included maybe a months worth of not writing and probably a week or two of rewrites. All of this is around full time work. I also probably spent about another two weeks of time researching all the mythology included in my books and studying wolf behaviour and working out what to include in my series.

    My first draft is usually about 80,000 words and is pretty basic. For me a first draft is about the story line, not the characters. I go for a solid story line first up and then I work on fixing up the plot holes and work on character development. Only once I'm happy with the plot and the characters will I begin extensive editing, unless I get stuck then I may go back and do a little rewriting.
     
  23. ChaosReigns

    ChaosReigns Ov The Left Hand Path Contributor

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    i tend to have a few grammatical errors, and some continuation errors. i mean, my first draft isnt great but i do have (in my opinion) a decent framework i can work upon.
     
  24. Selbbin

    Selbbin The Moderating Cat Staff Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    This question always surprises me. You can type 60k words pretty quickly. I'm sure I could knock out that many words in a weekend. There is no time frame that a book should or should not be generally written. And what constitutes that time? does it include work and family commitments. Do you subtract all the days you didn't write? How long is a piece of string?

    One batch of 60k can take 2 months and another 2 years. Content. I'd worry more about content.

    It reminds me of a great Oscar Wilde quote: 'I spent all morning putting in a comma, and all afternoon taking it out.'
     
  25. bythegods

    bythegods Banned

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    'How long is a piece of string' is not the question.

    Have you written 60K+ words? If so, how long did it take you? Under what circumstances did you achieve this?
     

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