10 ms·
Even a short novel is 50,000 words, that's 100 hours at a brisk pace of 500 words per hour. The NaNoWriMo folks famously challenge writers to do that in a month
by wnissen 2y ago
Even a short novel is 50,000 words, that's 100 hours at a brisk pace of 500 words per hour. The NaNoWriMo folks famously challenge writers to do that in a month. So I don't doubt that some people can do it (10x writers?) but even typing 50K words at 70 wpm would take 12 hours. Famous writers tend to produce a few hundred to a few thousand words per day. Lets say 300-3000, so between 17 and 170 days to write a short novel.
- vidarh 2y agoThe thing is "10x writers" (in terms of volume, at least) aren't uncommon at all. My best day while writing my second novel I wrote ~11k words. That was <6 hours of writing. My biggest challenge was 1) maintaining focus, 2) I have other things to do. Most writers can write quite fast if they really have to, but given the income distribution it rarely seems worth it: If you make little, it becomes a labour of love and you're more interested in producing something you can be proud of; if you make a lot, the pressure to churn it out at high speed lessens. And while there are some in-between who need to churn things out fast because they depend on the income, they are few (incidentally there seems to be only poor correlation between rate of writing and income per book). And so the speed people write at seems to often depend more on whether people choose to because they see it as a job to get done vs art/a personal project.