But in order to do that, I need to procrastinate for about 4 hours first, which kind of kills my average time.

And that's just on first drafts. My subsequent drafts are very slow.

When I'm in "I don't care what I write I just want to get it on the page" mode I can write 1000 (thousand) words an hour or more. I've even done that many in half an hour. Granted, I cannot keep this furious pace up for long.

When I'm in "I do care what I write but this is just a rough draft" mode I come in under 1k words an hour, although not much.

When I'm in final draft mode, I try to slow myself down to 500 words an hour and make them all ring right.

But I never go much slower than that in an hour that is actually spent writing (as opposed to thinking, developing, editing, etc.) If I do, it is a clear sign that I am agonizing too hard and actually my work can suffer from that.

But if I were to count all the words I erased and rewrote and erased....then it would be significantly higher.

I don't worry about it. I just make sure not to begin querying until I have a completed project. That way I don't have to worry about making a deadline. I can take as long as I need to get it the way I want it.

I dont like revisiting things very much. I like to move forwards (but prettly slowly i guess lol).

I'm trying to pick all the right words and phrasing on the first run through. Then when I come back to the work I'll even start going back over old stuff in the middle of trying to come up with new parts.

Quality, not quantity.

Last night I wrote about 600 words in three hours, so that's 200 words an hour. And this morning I wrote 195 in about an hour. So 200wph is probably my normal writing speed for fiction.

I believe I once spent six hours to end up with 400 words, so that's 67 words per hour, but I don't recommend that.

Stories are more than words, and the right word choice is not the end-all-be-all of story telling. In fact, I find that (for those who have a respectable command of the English language) there is rarely much difference between: Write it like this. and: Write it like that. There are a hundred right ways to form a sentence, a pargarph, a page, and as long as you pick one of those right ways the real punch of the story comes in the story itself.

I find it astonishing that you don't do rewrites due to this careful method. I almost don't believe it. I never rewrite stories because my word choice is off. That's what revision and editing is for, not redrafting. I don't even rewrite stories for the reported moments of boredom, lack of clarity, and lack of beilevability of the reader. That usually just takes some spit and polish.

I rewrite stories because the critiquers come back and say "You characterization needs work." or "This underlying plot element is not believable." or "I think you started at the wrong place." I don't get that last one often anymore, I think I finally figured it out.

Anyway, my point is that I don't see any of these things changing for slowing the pace down to 100 words an hour. I think that would just drive me crazy. Heck, I couldn't write a short story a week at that rate. Even with three revisions and critiquing in between I think I could finish faster, not to mention with a better-refined story.

I dont doubt for 1 minute that I will have to go back and rewrite or fixup my story when I've finished it. But I'm trying to do as much as I can right the first time around to minimise this as much as possible. The problem is that I may be too impatient. Once I've finished something, I like to move on (not just in writing, my I.T. projects, music ... its just how i like to work). I dont like to keep going back to stuff over and over.

It took me a long time to adapt to writing stories on a computer. The urge to self-edit while writing was overwhelming. I stopped writing for several years, partly due to that.

On good days, I typically get about 1500 words an hour -- most of them crap, probably. Most days, I'll do about 800 or so. Some days I get about 100 total words written for that day. (I usually write for 4 hours per day, if I can manage it.) I like to stop every once and while and consider my story options; think about the characters, their lives outside of the story, etc. I'll probably get up and go out into the garden and pull weeds during these moments. This helps me develop the characters a little more, strangely. Sometimes I'll visit Hatrack and offend someone during a quick break. Things vary.

Speed isn't the issue, though. Don't feel as if you need to get a particular amount of words down. Just write.

Unfortunately, (and I can't speak for Benskia) my slowness is due to an almost obsessive/compulsive need to have each sentence sound just so before I go onto the next sentence. I know that I shouldn't worry about that in the first draft but I didn’t know how to turn it off.

That is actually where Mike's flash challenge helped me a lot. I had not even heard of flash fiction until last weekend when he posted that challenge. I honestly didn't think I'd be able to do it but decided to give it a shot. It wasn't the most wonderful thing ever written but I got an entire story down in an hour. I was amazed.

This forces you to conceive an idea and write a full story (beginning, middle and end) within a set period of time like an hour or two. The concept is to force yourself to just write and trust that you'll get it mostly right .

I had never tried a flash challenge before last week, but you know what, it was pretty fun and the product quality was pretty good across the board.

I write about 500 to 1000 words per hour, at least for short stories, but I spend several hours before that thinking about the story structure, character voice, etc. I don't like to revise or re-write and usually only go through one, maybe two sweeps.

Before I did National Novel Writing Month, I was the kind of person who obsessed over every word and sentence. During that month I had to write 2k words a day, no matter what. I found that when I applied my BIC and just did it, I got done in about two hours. When I did little contests with myself, to see how many words I could write in 20 minutes, then repeat to try and beat myself, I would typically get 500 words in 20 minutes. Since NaNoWriMo, I have found that my speed has not decreased back to where it was before, yet my quality has also not decreased that much. My first drafts are still about as good as they were back when I took forever to write them; in fact, I'd say they are better. And I get more stories written.

I also don't believe that there is one perfect way to say each sentence. Yes, it is always possible to improve things, but there are several ways to say the exact same thing and it comes down to preference.

Another exercise to try is to take a scene you've already written at your usual pace and re-write it in an hour. Are your language choices that different? Is the quality lacking? After revising the scene a bit, how does the quality compare?

Part of improving as a writer is to work on increasing quality and quantity, imo.

quote:

---

spent the morning putting in a comma, and the afternoon taking it out

---

I'm gonna guess James Joyce...

--Googlepause--

Doh! Oscar Wilde is the answer.

Oh well.

I had a teacher once that could type 9000 wph. Now that's fast!

[This message has been edited by Shendülféa (edited April 08, 2005).]

It increased my rate by about 700%.
However, there are plenty of mistakes, duplicated words and even the odd ---oh my god, what's that word when you write something and then say something completely different later on.

But, I was pretty happy with what I wrote. And I reckon it would only take me another hour to fix things. So maybe doing a quick draft first would be better. Hmmmm. some experimentation require methinks.

---oh I just got there - contradiction. That's it.