Questions to ask a writer

Questions:

1. How many words do you usually write a day?

2. How long does it usually take you to complete one of your WIPs?

3. What's the longest time you've worked on a completed MS? Shortest?

4. How many times to revise it?

5. How many manuscripts have you written?

1. How many words do you usually write a day?


First off:

I do not write in chapters.

I do not write to a set "hours per day"

I do not write to a set "words per day"

What I do is, I write small segments or scenes from my book. Say a conversation between two characters. Or maybe the description of a room. Something like that. I find this easier, because I can see a very clear beginning, middle, and end. Not the beginning, middle, and end of the entire book. Not the beginning, middle and end of the entire chapter. Just the beginning, middle, and end of that one scene, which in most cases is 2 to 4 paragraphs long or about 600 - 800 words.

I make it my goal to write three of these segmants each day.

One in the morning as soon as I wake up, before I even get out of bed.

One in the afternoon, when I get back in from taking my dog out for his daily walk.

One in the evening, last thing just before going to bed. It takes about 15 - 30 minutes for me to write each segment. Or about 40 minutes to an hour and a half each day. In the end I end up with about 2,750 words written at the end of the day. That is, if I actualy sit down and write at all! Some days it's just hard to get motivated to start writing.

Anyways, When you take it and break it down into tiny chunks like this, it seems like you haven't written very much at all, when in fact you have gone well above and beyond your word count goal.

Unfortunatly, though I try to do this every day, I often end up only doing this 2 or 3 days a week. I have had months where I suprised myself and write like this every single day, but I seem to have a hard time sticking with writing EVERY DAY, which is my goal.

2. How long does it usually take you to complete one of your WIPs?

novel first draft:... I've done 2 in 30 days or less (30 days or less for each one that is, not 2 in one month)... one was 183,000 words the other was 75,000 words. Both were written on a dare and required lots of editing afterwards; much more editing than they would have needed had I written them in say 3 months each instead of 30 days each. From that I learned that the faster I write the more mistakes I make, so I'll stick with slow and steady from now on.

those are not average for me though, 'cause usually it takes me 4 or 5 or more months to get that much done. My average is prob'ly closer to 6 months per book, not including editing time.

short story first draft:... depends on the length of the story. 2 or 3 hours for every 1,000 or so words.

3. What's the longest time you've worked on a completed MS? Shortest?

longest: about 12 years
shortest: 183,000 words in 30 day days

My quickest time ever was in October 2007 when I raced myself against the clock and wrote an 11,500 word short story in one 5 hour sitting, but boy did my hand hurt afterwards. I don't plan on ever trying to type a story by a time clock ever again! I just wanted to prove to myself that I COULD type fast if I really tried, but now that I'm happy with the fact that I could do it if I tried, I just continue to type at a slow pace because I've learned that "slow and steady wins the race" while fast and furious just hurts my hand.

4. How many times to revise it?

depends on what I'm writing, but rarely more than twice

the editing process for me, takes about 2 moths per revision, so editing twice adds another 4 months to each project


5. How many manuscripts have you written?


novels and novellas: uhm... no idea; about 30ish, I aim for at least one per year, while striveing for 2 per year

short stories: again, no idea... about 200+; I strive for at least one per month


What's your take on this? I'd love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!




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Copper Cockeral
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