Itake a break every so often. I write short stories and so I take a while between them. However I write two to three maybe more poems a day to keep me upbeat. Poetry is easier forme and I practice metaphors and usage of words that I don't get to use ever in the spoken world. In the meantime I reasearch ideas and feedbacks to understand what I am about as a writer.
I only wish I had enough time for writing to consider time spent not writing as a break. As a total beginner, only just starting out I have a full-time job so I get up 30 mins earlier than I need to every day and THAT's MY writing time. The rest of the day is a break from writing.
THIS^^ I have a full time job which is 1.5 hours commute away. I get up at 5am, am on the train at 6.30, get to work at 8.10, work til 4.30, get the train at 4.50, home at 6.30. My writing time has to be squeezed in somewhere while I'm at home, which is difficult because I have a very demanding house rabbit and a less demanding but noisier housemate to contend with. I usually only find peace and quiet after they've gone to bed around midnight or 1am, which gives me only as long as I can stay awake to write. Maybe 2 hours a night. 2 or 3 hours sleep a night means I'm wiped out by the weekend, when I could actually spend a decent amount of time writing. This is why I am currently only able to finish about 1 chapter a month :-(
I've been taking too many 'breaks' that have lead to writer's block which lasted God knows how long. So, for me, I take breaks for a few hours, then I go back to write a paragraph to a page.
i don't have the luxury to write 3 or 4 hours straight, with school and work, i only write when i have the time to, mainly on the one hour bus i take every morning, (writing a novel on an iphone is the worst thing ever), so you could say i take 6 hours break between every time i write . but i try to write everyday, (except for weekends) and no, i don't take breaks between chapters. i take breaks only when i'm getting sick of writing and i start to hate everything. lol
To be fair, it sounds like you should sleep at night and then spend your entire weekends writing, when you're actually fresh and awake and your head can actually function. Even 1 hour of work done when your head is fresh as compared to 3 hours when your head is just slush and goo is way more worth it, and usually of higher quality, and it also means you can stop torturing yourself during the weekdays. And as for myself, I lack so much discipline that what I need is to WRITE rather than take breaks. I feel like I'm always taking breaks because my personal specialty is procrastination :redface:
Usually, I write whenever I get the chance. My breaks aren't really breaks. They're just my everyday life occurring. When I do willingly take breaks from writing, I'm playing guitar or recording.
Well, that would make a degree of sense I guess, but I actually write better at night - I've always been a night owl. My brain actually kicks into gear about 11pm and maintains revs til it suddenly just runs out of fuel and stalls at about 3 or 4am. I also can't write when there are other people around, so I like the night as it's like being alone in the world - even the birds and traffic has gone to bed. And I still do write at the weekend - the last few Friday nights I've stayed up til 8 or 9am writing, then crashed out and gone to bed til the afternoon! Maybe I'm just nocturnal? It's only the damn job preventing me from doing it permanently
Sometimes I just don't feel like writing. This happened a few days ago and it was kinda scary, but I'm back on track now. But anyway, in Stephen King's On Writing, he mentions that he can manage about 2,000 words per sit-down (then revises and deletes 1/4). I notice when I near 1,500+ words I really tire out and my mind gets a little sluggish -- but it can also depend on the fun you're having and what sort of inspiration is fueling you. When I take breaks, ahh, there are a million other things I can do: homework, read, write, visit other forums, Tumblr... It's troublesome because I find that I feel in the mood to write the most late at night. Which sort of clashes with getting up at 6 for school.
Yup. I also work full-time with 10 hours a week in commuting time, and then tack on another 20 to 30 hours doing schoolwork. In fact, I just turned in an assignment and playing on the internet is my treat. This might sound really weird (because it does to me), but I actually find I manage the stresses of managing work & school & family better when I am writing consistently. Since I've had this crazy schedule I've found I can write just about anywhere and at any time. I prefer writing in long chunks of time and take breaks by fetching the mail or making lunch. Or doing housework. Or yard work. Or go hiking. It doesn't really matter what I do, except shopping and TV put me in a terrible mood for writing anything productive. What I "hear" stays with me when I'm too tired. The longest break I ever took from writing would be when I took my first accounting class, because it was sooo grueling! I just needed the time to try and absorb the material. Interestingly, the singlemost productive writing time I ever had began within a couple months after that break, when I finished my first novel-length first draft.
I hear you about the Accounting thing. I'm in the last two months of an Accounting program right now, and after I get my license I need to get certified in Quickbooks for Accountants. I wish I'd never signed up for it because it tires me out so much that I'd rather tweak on here than work on my books. Anyway I guess I may as well answer my own question. When I was working full-time I only wrote a few times a week (maybe up to three or four hours max) because I was also balancing school. Now that I'm not working outside of the home, my time is pretty much split even between my schoolwork and my writing. I spend 3-4 hours every other day on homework, and at least an hour or two everyday for writing. I spend a lot of time brainstorming and jotting down ideas though.
Just out of curiousity, how much do you guys write everyday? Or how long? I don't have a certain amount of time I write for. I try to write 1500-3000 words a day.
No lie, probably 500-700 words per day. Depending on what I'm writing. If I'm writing a short story than sometimes I manage even less. I try to write 2,000 words in one day. Than the next day I end up throwing 1,500 of those words in the garbage. So 500
This, Sir, makes you a god. Stephen King is said to write 350 words a day, and it is pretty clear how prolific he has been. If I write fifty good words in a day (these days being few and far between) I feel accomplished, and it doesn't have to have anything to do with the current piece I am working on or not. If I just write fifty words of good strong fiction, I know I will be able to use it in the future, no matter what. Frankly, to me, 1500-3000 words a day is ludicrous if it's your average (if you're on a burst to shove a short story out than it is completely possible, but the editing is going to be horrendous). In the long run, the truth is that writing can be analogous with anti-aircraft fire from WW2, throw enough flak in the air and you're bound to hit something, and that's the thread you can follow and write good, strong material from. But if the exigencies of your work need validating put them forth in the Workshop forums, and at least I promise to critique them.
For me it's between 0 to 10,000. I don't count, I write what I want and I've had many days without writing anything good at all, so 0, and I've written 3-4 chapters in a day, so 10,000. The number of words mean nothing to me.
I've been slacking for the last two weeks, but when I'm in my usual routine I try to write at least 500 words.
Lol, I have no doubt some of the stuff I am writing will be trashed . I am still in highschool in the mid grades so I don't get much homework and I have lots of time to write at night. Between friends, sports, and school I have probably 2-6 hours a day to write. Plus I am on a three week holiday so I plan to finish my first draft by the middle of the holiday. I would put out some of my writing out at the Workshop forums but I plan to try to get published with the book. I have some old materualI wrote that I might post, but that stuff is pretty bad. I spend at least an hour or two for every thousand words and I am a pretty inspired writer. When I get going, I don't stop until I at least have scene done. It is a good thing I love to edit (I am a perfectionist)
It depends at the stage in the process, if I have children around, how well I am feeling, if I am in the 'zone', a quick dirty draft moves faster than my final careful draft. I usually do around 3-7K a day (it takes me 2-3 hours). If I am editing I may lose more than I write or only write ten words. Once I am into a story, and if I can talk hubby into giving me a day I can get 20K-35K written in a day. It doesn't matter how fast you write as long as you are happy with the content at the end of the day, you are completeing works etc I know published authors that churn out around 900-1000 words every 20 minutes and others that do 100 in the same time frame. All get books completed that are worth reading.
It varies a lot. Some days you get a fire up your fancy regions and you can write for hours without stop. Other times I'll agonize over one or two paragraphs for days trying make them come out properly. You also have periods where events over take your world for a while and there's not much you can do about it. Unless there are external forces plotting against me, I always try to get as many hours as I can every day. That doesn't mean they may be fruitful hours, unless you consider sour grapes fruitful.
That's like, a third of a novel - you can't possibly write a whole novel in 3 days??? (admittedly good days)
I can do that as well. It might help that I am an unusually fast typer. It's extremely rare for me, but I once spent a week just writing and ended up with a whole first draft for a novel of about 70K. On an average day I probably write 3K. I set a goal and time for myself each day, like today I have decided that from five to seven I am going to write 4K. Yesterday I was pretty busy, so I decided that from 1 to 1:30 I had to write 800 words. But I only do this for first drafts. Editing is a lot slower.
when working on a major project i've been known to work 18-20 hours/day, for weeks... i write non-stop, forget to eat, if no one puts any food in front of me...
It is not about the number of words, it's about their quality. It's easy to just churn out sentences, I can write 10 000 words of blah blah in a day, but that is a waste of time (unless it is an outline, but that's not really "writing") but the ones I'd be proud to see in print are few and far between. On my best days, if I'm working 16 hours straight because I am drunk with inspiration (happens especially if I'm writing a short story) I can do 5000 distilled down to 2000 good ones in a day, but that happened a handful of times. When I am working on a novel, on a good day I can do 500 - 1000 but only with well thought out scenes and if I am crazy inspired. On an average day, after hours of frustration and editing I might polish up 100 - 300. On a bad day - nothing.
It totally depends on the day and depends on what you are referring to as writing. If I added up all my facebook posts, emails, and forum posts, and the short story I was working on yesterday, in one day, I wrote a good 10k of words. Some days it might only be 500 words if I'm not feeling it. But most days I average at least 3000 - 8000 if you consider all writing as the act of writing. As far as working on specific stories, take yesterday for example, wrote about 1000 words on a story. But some days I can churn out 5000 - 8,000 words on a story and not write anywhere else. Unless I have errands to run or I'm super tired or sick, that is generally what I do in a day.
Yeah, I can physically type 60 words a minute, by which reconing I should be typing 3600 words an hour, so in a ten hour day 35,000 words would be easy. In reality, that 35,000 words would be utter shite - stream of consciousness stuff that has no proper place in a novel, and would barely be intelligable to a psychoanalyst. So, if you get 35,000 words on paper (or word file) in a day, how much of that is actually of a half decent quality, and how much of it ends up on the cutting room floor? Coz I'm thinking you must have REALLY rough drafts and spend a helluva lot of time editing. I revise as I go, a paragraph at a time, so by the time I have 1000 words, it's the equivalent of someone else's second or third draft. Spelling, grammar and punctuation will be near perfect - I'm like that, I can't just crack out a rough draft because I have to keep going back and re-reading what I've just written, tidy it up, and make sure every sentence, paragraph, scene etc flows properly. Guess this means I'm not what you'd call a 'prolific' writer
