For me it depends which draft -sure first draft is crap. These days it would be editable into a novel, but I expect more from my stories and I rewrite them two-three times. (by rewrite I mean bin the draft and start again from scratch). The next draft will go quicker and be reasonable, editable quality, but I have personally found to do three from scratch drafts is beneficial in terms of bringing in an deepening foreshadowing, themes and motifs etc. Personally, my way of working would mean I would do those rewrites anyway, so to produce a clean first draft would be a pointless waste of time. To get a novel to the stage where I would be happy sending it to an agent takes around three months, working between two-four hours a day. If I plotted my stories I guess two drafts would do and I could write them quicker. It is much easier to delete, change, and severely edit something I've spent ten minutes on than something I've spent hours on.
Oh, I can shred something I've spent hours on, don't worry about that. I frequently do just that - spend hours and hours agonising over a scene or even a paragraph, getting it just right, only to come back and delete it on the read through. Sometimes I'll just edit it on successive read throughs, maybe a dozen times or more, until I'm really really happy with the way it reads and it expresses exactly what I meant it to. Then I'll realise the whole passage needs to go, and it's gone in the time it takes to highlight and hit the delete key. I never used to be that ruthless, but I've learned to be. It hasn't reduced the amount of time I spend trying to make a scene or chapter perfect, but it means I don't hesitate to murder my darlings anymore.
I like your way of working, to me it's really inspiring and it gives me energy to hear about people doing like this because I work almost the same way. But are you telling me you complete three drafts in three months???? Jesus, woman! I think we can put this competition to rest right here. We have a winner!
No Tesoro, the competition has moved on - didn't you see the rule change? We're competing on length of commute and general life business now. She only wins if she has 8 full time jobs, 14 kids, 12 rabbits, 126 cats (i.e. runs some kind of cat home on the side) and commutes to the north pole and back to cover for Santa Claus during his busy periods
I can write a draft in 20 days I do home educate three small children so allows me some flexbility with my working patterns. But however fast we write the prize is the same - a well written piece of work I know published writers who write at similar speeds to myself and others write much slower.
Tell me about it! I completed the first draft of my novel over twenty years ago, and sort of set it on the back burner as I turned to other writing projects. But I started a revision back in the 90s (still incomplete - it's on the back burner again), but I could never get the opening paragraph right. I've pulled the draft out and reworked that paragraph hundreds of times since the mid-nineties, spending who knows how many hours on it, and I still couldn't get it right. So finally, after all that, sometime last year I just deleted it. Then I set the new draft aside for a month or two, then brought it out and reread the first couple of chapters. You know what? I never needed that paragraph in the first place. Deleting it was a joy - it made the work better, and got what was feeling like a ten-ton boulder off my shoulders. Moral of the story: If it's not working, it doesn't matter how much time you've spent on it - get rid of it! You'll be happier.
Hehehe, yes I saw that but I still felt like this called for an award of some kind. So, who's in the lead right now?
all i can say for basic rule in tailoring: -draw pattern, then -cut while follow the pattern what we can't do is: -cut and think what will it look like -retouch the cutting after that the result will be: -smaller size -larger size -misplaced -miscalculate the suggestion will be: -we only have one chance, one material, to make a cloth and, my point is: -you guys are genius. definitely! ___________________________ I tried my first draft are masterpiece as it should. Tried not depending on editing. And i got my price around 2-3 hours each chapter and the words around 500 to 2000. (if i post in english plus 1 hour for translating)
That is the beauty of writing though, especially if you are using a PC is that we have as many cloths as we need to make a story from. I've got one that by the time I'd finished the first draft I had enough material for four novels and realised it needed a prequel.
cloths mean your quality and time. In my mind, that the most valueable things in our life. If you wanna make a lot of clothes, then you will waste it in same time. That's my thought
Ok, but do you actually write that every day as the OP asked? I think if we all had unlimited time most of us would write more than we do today, but sometimes this little thing called life comes in between.
If you think something you just wrote is "very nice" there's probably something wrong with it. But if I'm wrong good job and keep going.
Then good job and keep going. I wonder, do you guys posting on here count every single thing you write or just the finished stuff? Because 500 in an entire day doesn't sound like much if you're not carefully picking words and choosing where your story's going. Just curious.
I don't count rough draft - to me that's not really word count, it's notes. I can jot down stuff that comes into my head on just about anything that's to hand - envelopes, train tickets, etc - but until it makes it to the word document for my novel and goes through at least a rudimentary polishing process, it's not word count. It's blather.
I write 3-5 pages in a day, not sure how many words, but my writing is tiny. Much of that is just experimentation with different scenes, though. And yes, I find that the days I write more, the writing is of better quality. Days I write less, I tend to have severe mental blockage which cramps both quality and quantity. I did once write 60 pages in a day. This was back in High School, when I was running late on a short story assignment. I wrote 60 of the 90 pages (so not really that short of a story) on the last day before it was due. It was a Sunday, so I just sat in one place and wrote all day. The other pages 30 I wrote the day earlier. Those were the most productive two days of my life, lol. I've never come close to that since then. I've improved in quality, just not qantity.
Wow! They made you write a ninety-page story in high school? That teacher must have been working overtime trying to grade them all!
The worst part is that it was student edited. I feel bad, actually, because I made a ton of grammatical errors, and my poor classmates had to edit the whole thing in a day.
Actually, there was no length requirement- or limit. I had a cool comp teacher who basically said "When the story's done, it's done." Most people wrote five to ten pages. I went. . .a bit overboard. I was warned about the assignment a month ahead of time, but I spent all month trying to decide what to write. I went back and forth, and wrote and scrapped and wrote and scrapped until I had two days left. Then I settled on my simplest idea and, as said, wrote 90 pages in two days. I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever written, but the students who reviewed it thought it was amazing. Maybe they lied. I'll never know for sure.
I am like that too. I went back and looked at some of my chapters and I noticed the chapter that I wrote in a day was better then the chapter I wrote in a week. It is rather strange but you can't really choose when you are in the zone or not.
I used to write for three to four hours a day. Later, I found this approach unsustainable, and I lowered it to one to two hours a day. I'm aiming for consistency rather than bursts of inspiration. As for how many words I write a day, I'm not fussed about it. I'm editing my novel at the moment. Of course, this means I'll been writing less words per day. As long as you're clocking in hours consistently, you'll get there sooner or later. Most important, everyone's approach is different. If it works for you, nobody can say a thing about it.
First of all I'm not posting this for bragging rights! I actually consider myself a slow writer. This is something that gets me curious. Everyone have their own methods, so it would be cool to know what others are doing! I tend to write weekly, or two days a week, an average of 1,500-3,000 words a week, but I don't know if my speed is alright. Obviously, writing does not depend solely on speed, since you need time to think the plot, stablish a direction to follow, make mindmaps and so forth. So, what's your writing speed?
I can put out a short story of 1,000 from concept to finish of first draft in about an hour. A chapter of 10,000 words for a novel in a day if it's all thought out. But, I may spend the rest of the week playing with it before it feels right. Writing is rarely the issue for me, as long as my hands will take it. Getting it to read properly is the hard part.
