McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
most productive day ever
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
4700 words tonight, and two climactic scenes; only a bit of denouement needing doing, but I need to reread the last 20,000 words before I do that to make sure it all flows, and it's now 2 am, so not tonight.
I've been to Oxford twice. there's at least one nice pub and at least one very nice dessert place there. I intend to go back next time I'm in Hyperborea.
LizW65:
Let's see...I got 12 pages at one clip last week. In terms of sheer volume, that was one of my most productive days yet. I only stopped when my hands began to cramp up from all the typing.
myquasilatinphrase:
I could stop to get the word count... But I prefer to count pages or content as a judge of how productive I am. I'm an abstract random sort of writer, because as soon as I reach a pause in the action, I'll stop to do a quick edit, then check my outline, and make sure I haven't missed anything before moving on, and that gets time consuming. But probably my most productive day was something like fifteen pages, near the very climax of action, and it came out beautifully...
I tend to get lost in the world, and what's happening, and especially if I'm writing for my favorite villian... Everything just picks up steam, and then finally I finish putting all the beauty and drama onto paper... And I'm shocked when I realize I'm on page 7, or 12, or 22.
*pause*
Okay, I just dug through my records, and my best day was 7.6 thousand words, but I usually average 3 to 5 thousand to get a good scene done. If I'm on a good writing day, I can usually get 4K words in two hours.
But I'm also writing with a handicap of having a life that leaves very little time for writing. It took me 6 months to write 225 pages. But I -will- finish... just slow and steady.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: myquasilatinphrase on November 17, 2008, 08:00:25 AM ---I could stop to get the word count... But I prefer to count pages or content as a judge of how productive I am.
--- End quote ---
I almost always work in terms of getting a certain scene done, but I assess it by wordcount basically because pagecount is next to meaningless; it varies between programs you could use to write the thing in, and the difference in pagecount between the same book in manuscript, hardcover or paperback is really quite large and not all that predictable depending on decisions about font and so forth that are made at the publishing level and beyond an author's control. Wordcount is at least pretty stable and generalisable.
LizW65:
Well, I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment today -- not that it was an especially productive day in terms of volume, but I finally finished the first draft of my first novel. Ten and a half months (no, I wasn't writing full-time, or even every day, not by a long shot) and 150,000 words, give or take a couple hundred.
It's REALLY rough in places, and requires more research and some serious revision before I'd even think of showing it to anyone for critique, but to get this far on any writing project is a major step for me.
I think I'm going to take Stephen King's advice from On Writing and put it away for a few weeks to gain some perspective while I block out the sequel and begin researching the business end of writing, before I buckle down and begin the long process of revision.
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