Your Creative Writing Speed

How does your creative writing speed contrast with your copywriting speed?

Almost everyone I know writes faster if they're given something to copy, versus anything they come up with on their own. I type copy at around 75-80 words per minute, but that slows to 11-16 words per minute when I type creatively.

I primarily use a tablet, for which my average copying speed is 21 words per minute. By swiping rather than tapping each letter, I can increase that speed, but it's still a gruelingly slow pace. In whatever form I write, my creative writing speed seems to be about 20% of my copying speed.

 

I'm confused. Copywriting is just as creative as novel writing, but you seem to put it in another category?

Or do you mean literally copying something - typing up something already hand-written?

Assuming the latter, I type at about 10owpm or 6,000 words per hour, but I write about 1,000 words an hour when I have to come up with the words as I go. That's true of writing copy and writing a story.

 

By "copywriting" I mean you're just re-typing something someone's already written. I could be using the word wrong.

 

Ahh, I wondered.

Copywriting means writing copy, not copying writing. Confusing, huh? Copy is something used to promote a business or organisation, so you can have advertising copy or website copy or a million other types of copy.

 

God, I hate English sometimes.

 

When I first draft I average somewhere around 500 words an hour. The high being about 1200 an hour and the low being 0. I legitimately haven't copied anything of substantial length since typing class in high school (God gave us control-v for a reason), so I don't know what my current speed for that is, but back then 30 words per minute was the minimum required to pass and I made that, but barely.

 

I type about 70 words a minute. I write about 1K words an hour, which converts to about 17 words a minute.

 

I have no idea how fast I type (how do you all know this yourselves??) or any interest in knowing (that's probably why I don't). What I can tell you, is that I'd type a hell of a lot faster if I were copying from something already written.

I don't really see why you would think the answer is going to be anything other than this. When you're copying something already written you're not having to think about what you type, so how could it not be faster?

 

I think there may be hunt-and-peck style writers who are actually limited by the speed of their typing. The ideas come faster than they can get them on the screen.

But I agree, for most competent typists typing is not the limiting factor in writing speed.

 

There are multiple typing tests available online. I happen to know my typing speed because I was required to take a test for a job.

As for why there might be varied answers, there are some who have claimed their speed doesn't suffer between copying and original writing. The numbers themselves are also a curiosity. Some writers manage high word counts in a day consistently, but don't type all that fast. Others type very quickly, but don't produce high word counts.

I know my lack of organization pretty well shoots my productivity in the foot with an anti-aircraft gun. I'd be a lot more consistent in my word counts if I worked at being consistent.

 

I know how fast I type because I've done a lot of writing and a lot of that writing has had word count requirements. Also, double spaced 12 point Courier gives you about 250 words per page, so if I consistently sit down for 6 hours and walk away with 12 pages, the correlation isn't really that hard to notice. Plus, counting words per day is a good way to keep motivated. It's like a fundraising thermometer for self esteem.

 

Oh I make a mental note of my words per day, but never bother calculating my WPM. It's of no interest to me.

 

I'm pretty slow in both respects since I never could grasp proper typing, what with the "home row" and all that. Though I've gotten pretty good by just using random fingers, mostly index. "Pretty good" relative to how other non-home-row typers do. I think so, anyway. But my creative writing speed suffers because I think and edit as I go. I wrote 750 words yesterday over about 3 hours, of which 578 are actually used for the story. It's a short. So not spectacular. For my internship, I need to transcribe videos sometimes, and I really have to push myself to match my typing speed to someone talking at .5x speed. Typos abound and a worn out right-click, but the words get down. Those are the best examples I have at the moment.

 

Most people average in the neighborhood of 500 words an hour, which works out to about eight words a minute.

I'm no exception. And I figure it works the same for most people as it does for me: I'm still typing around 100 words per minute when I'm typing. It's just that, most of the time, I'm not typing at all; I'm sitting here, scratching my chin, wondering what the hell happens next.

 

I type about 110 words per minute. I write about 500 fiction words per three or four hours. So, pretty totally unrelated.

 

Probably the faster a thinker you are, the closer your ratio of copying speed to creative writing speed approaches 1.

 

I had to check to see how fast I type. Minus the obligatory warmup, I hit a paltry ~50 a minute. As for creative writing, it depends. My upper limit has to be about 5000 word in 7-8 hours. If I've done my math right, that's ~10-12 words a minute.

 

Holy crap. Takes me half an hour to get through a single paragraph. I mean, I have to do fantasy worldbuilding and make it consistent, but still.

 

100-140 wpm for copy writing
60 - 100 wpm for creative writing

 

I never delete anything of substance. I just moved a single paragraph that was no longer relevant, to the scrap heap. The retained, "I might find it useful later" scrap heap.

 

It's resolved in the sense that 98% of what I lost, I found, by going through the older backups, snapshots, etc. But I don't intend to trust Scrivener quite so much in the future. I'm doing a daily backup, and I printed the whole thing (in ittybitty print for minimum paper use) and plan to do that roughly once a week. I didn't print the scrap heap. Oddly, I lost very little of the scrap heap, but come to think of it, I think I'll do a Compile to text of all of it, once in a while.

 

I haven't tested my typing speed since I left school, back in 1967! I was slow then. I'm a lot faster now. But my ability to type words is not really holding my writing back at all. Thinking takes the time it takes.

This would only be an issue if you thought a lot LOT faster than you could type. I don't think any competent typist does that!

 

I'm probably unique here in the fact that I rely heavily on the autocomplete.

It probably comes from coding. Programmers use the autocomplete for absolutely everything, I almost never write out variable or keywords in their entirety.

I've transferred that skill to word processing. I've gotten to the point where I know how many letters I need to type before I can press enter, tab, or space and let the computer finish the word for me. This has probably doubled my typing speed and I expect it to continue to accelerate as parsing power increases.