8 10 2011

I'm trying to write a book (or what I expect to be two books) averaging (at most) 150-200,000 words (I'd like to keep it on the 150,000 end of things though.) Lets use 175,000 for convinience. (For comparison, Return of the King had about 135,000 words, and Deathly Hallows had about 200,000.)

On average, given editing and proofreading time, a writer produces about 1,000 words per hour. This holds pretty true for me. I write about twice that fast, but will spend the same amount of time later whittling it down and rewriting.

I've read a few places that on average 1/5 of the words a writer writes get used. I think I do better, but lets use that number, because I'd rather be pessimistic and have room to do better. (I don't know if this is actually a rate comparison. It may be this number assumes I'm “producing” 5000 words in one hour, then spending the next 4 hours editing.)

So if we need 350,000 words for both, and only 1/5 get used, we'll need 5 times that many. 1,750,000 words. A daunting number. If I write every day of the year, I'd need to write just under 5,000 words per day. If I “average” 1,000 words per hour, that's 5 hours a day.

My current goal is to write for 8+ hours on every day I'm not otherwise working. (Currently, I work 1-3 days a week.)

Assuming I can keep this up, math tells me I can write two books by september 2012.