4 ms·

I feel like setting yourself a "words/period of time" ratio is only good if you do not fear deleting these words afterwards. It's like setting a "LOC/period of

• louisdorard 13y ago
  That's a very good point. These 1000 words often get replaced or deleted. I guess that in many creative activities it's painful to edit down, but it usually pays off. Sometimes you don't just delete what you wrote but you rephrase it. I find it much easier to formulate a complex idea when I already have a first version in front of me (even if it's terrible), than to start from nothing.
  • henrik_w 13y ago
    I agree completely, and for me it applies equally to writing and coding.
• munificent 13y ago
  If you don't fear deleting words you wrote, it's unlikely you'll be able to finish writing a good book. You're either be too paralyzed to write anything, or you'll write garbage (because all first drafts are garbage) and then be unwilling to revise it. I don't think prose maps neatly to programming. With code, the endless abstraction features of the language make the ratio of LOC/# features very fungible and gaming the former often doesn't help the latter. With prose, sure, the structure and outline of your book will affect its size, but my experience (60k words into a ~90k book) is that a certain amount of material takes a certain amount of words and you just have to work to get through them. Writing is a marathon and it helps to have some mile markers.