this is a good point. everyone has their own routine that works for them. by no means am i suggesting the proposed system is the way. only sharing it on the basis that it's helped me think in more structured terms. (used to be very disorganized) but i get the sense that most on the forum have a writing ritual's that working for them, which is great. (keep improving it!) if anyone is interested in hearing more about this particular routine, let me know.
Should be possible right? To go beyond 360 words per hour? Maybe at least a thousand words per hour? Is that doable? If yes, how to be capable to do it?
Writing faster doesn't mean writing better. I find I'm most comfortable and productive write around 500 words (including some editing as I write). Sometimes I'm faster like when I'm writing a news article. Or it can take me six hours to write a sonnet. But for fiction I'm almost always around 500 words per hour.
Faster doesn't mean better, hey I like that. Makes sense. Okay, 'tleast I know one person could do more-than-360-words per hour, aha. Were you always able to do that? If no, how did you improve yourself to be able to write 500 words per hour? I was trained in secondary school to write 360 words per hour but now could barely manage a hundred.
I used to be a journalist and had to write on deadline all the time. A scary editor breathing down your neck sure can make you write pretty fast. I did that for a long time before I started writing fiction. Fiction takes me more time. It doesn't feel like I'm writing slow while I'm working. Honestly, you don't want to rush through things just to have to rewrite them later. I'm far more concerned with the quality of my work than how fast I manage to get things done. But if you really want to improve, try giving yourself deadlines. If you write a chapter a week, you are bound to procrastinate at some point, leaving you only a day or two to bang out that chapter. If you are serious about writing and take your deadlines seriously, you'll get it done. And sometimes it will mean writing faster.
360 words an hour is only six words a minute. That seems painfully slow. I agree with those saying that speed shouldn't be a goal, in and of itself, but I don't agree that writing quickly necessarily means writing poorly. If a scene is flowing well and the ideas are playing in your brain like a movie, I think it's a real asset to be able to quickly get those ideas/images onto the page before the energy fades away. I'd say the ability to write quickly is an asset, and I don't see any automatic connection to quality. So, @Zack, you tell us... what's slowing you down? Typing speed? Maybe you should try dictation software. Don't know what to write? Maybe you should brainstorm/outline/clarify goals and ideas before you start writing. Word choice? There are writers who spend a lot of time finding the perfect words on the first draft, others who just get the general ideas down and go back to perfect things later. I don't think either approach is naturally better than the other. So... why do you want to write faster, and what's keeping you from doing so?
Really, 360wph is so slow! Aha. What's slowing me down? I think I never went beyond elementary level. Prolly cus I rarely read and write and thus never got around filling up my vocab repertoire and honing my articulative skills. I guess I don't really know, I mean I know what I want to write, but I don't really feel connected, I guess, to what I really want to write? I want to write faster because I want to produce a novel at quick rate. I think I should take the first step, which, as GRR Martin implied, I can't be a writer without being a reader. But I'm still wondering how I should efficiently approach this, do this, apply this, live this, whatever.
As a rough count you wrote 124 words on the above post #7 so that must have taken you nearly 21 minutes. Did it? You evaded Bayview's question IMO. Bayview is a well established and published author and is also a pantser so writing quickly for her is almost a given. However if you wrote 360 words an hour it would only take you a month to write an 80k novel working eight hours a day, every day. That would be very quick indeed. Worry less about your speed and just work on your story, your speed will increase as you develop your story I believe. Always remember the tortoise and the hare story: slow and steady wins the race.
But what is the actual process of writing like? You haven't really answered @BayView's questions, and they're useful questions. Did it indeed take you twenty-one minutes to write that post? If not, why? How is writing that post different from writing your book?
For me it's always been a matter of what stage in my writing I'm at. When I'm writing my first draft, I have a ton of ideas flowing and I'm just looking to get it all down. I could easily do 1000-1500 words in an hour. But, for instance, I was rewriting a chapter in my current WIP and it took me an hour to write one paragraph. As the others have said, worry less on speed and more on creating a good product.
I think I've answered BayView's question, albeit maybe not in a direct way. I just like being colloquial and nothing too strict follow-the-structure form of conversation. I failed to see how is it that you both think I haven't answered the question, aha. It only took 7-10 mins for me to write that post, I'm on tabs at that time. Prolly cus I know what I want to write and was being spontaneously comfortable. To clarify that I've actually answered BayView's questions:
What do you mean when you say you think you never went beyond elementary level? If you're talking about attending school, I'd assume you'd know how far you went, so... what are you talking about? And it's okay to write in simple, familiar terms - a huge vocabulary certainly doesn't hurt a writer, but it's far from necessary. Can you clarify why you want to write your novel at a quick rate? Right now it feels kind of circular... you want to write quickly because you want to write fast. But why do you want to write fast?
When you're asking people for advice, sometimes it's not a really great idea to make them work extra, extra hard to understand the question. They might realize that they don't work for you, and move on.
I generally write about a thousand words an hour, but tbh I don't time myself against word count , I just have an aim of getting to x point in the story before I stop, that could be 500 words away or 5000 and it takes as long as it takes.
It means like most of the times, I feel like my storytelling prowess and elaboration and narration technique are like those of a kid's. =/ But I want to achive greatness! Haha xD Ah I see, it was a vague response. I wanna write fast because I have huge outlines and a lot of worldbuilding notes with me where I plan, and can see am able, to write at least 10 books of the sci-fi-fantasy series that I'm working on. However, I don't want to take more than 20 years to complete them. So I would love to be able do it at much faster rate. Aha. Did that clarify it? Okay
When it comes to online interaction, sometimes I could do faster, but rarely very fast, sometimes not so fast. But when it comes to storytelling, it seems like I'm always stuck and at loss of words.
I'd say write it anyway - perfection paralysis , where you can't write because perfect prose doesn't flow from your pen , is a bit of a bugger but the solution is to give yourself permission to be crap ... its called the 'shitty first draft' for a reason
Ahh, "give yourself permission to be crap", that makes sense. I guess I'm just wanting everything to be just right at the first tries, haha, I should stop being like that, aha
nobody gets it right first time all the time - you can bet that even Shakespeare had drafts that wound up in the fire
"Just right the first time" is almost impossible. There are some people for whom it works, but those people are the exception, not the rule. I've more than once referred to the first draft as raw ingredients. Imagine that you get out the butter and eggs and flour for cupcakes, and you stare at them, and then you just put them all back, because, "They don't look like cupcakes at all!" Try just writing and then editing. And stop worrying about vocabulary. You can have "greatness" with a simple vocabulary--look at Hemingway. In addition to writing you should be doing a lot of reading, and reading will naturally expand your vocabulary, but don't make that expansion a priority. Writers who worry about their vocabulary sometimes worry about making their work sound prettier and fancier, too--often, while puzzling through a convoluted paragraph, I can imagine them saying to themselves, "OK, that was too clear, simple, and straightforward. How can I instead make it communicate how smart I am?" Don't try to sound smart. Be clear, simple, and straightforward.
I've breached the 2000 word threshold within an hour, but that's quite rare. And in that case it ended up pretty good - just in the zone I guess. I wouldn't fixate so much on the word count. Some days the words are going to come more easily than others. If you're having a hard time producing, you can try doing some stream of consciousness writing. That seems to loosen things up for some people.
