What's an Hour?
It's no wonder you're confused. Here are some of the types of "hours" that are sometimes included, sometimes excluded, when people are talking about "words per hour" or "words per day."- Hours thinking about the content before writing a word.
- Hours typing a first draft.
- Hours thinking about the content after writing some words.
- Hours editing an Nth draft.
- Hours researching a draft or revision or redraft.
= Hours corresponding with reviewers and dealing with their comments.
- Hours trying to sell the manuscript.
- Hours working with editors after a ms. is sold.
- Hours working on promotional material.
- Hours corresponding with readers (including writing blog entries like this one).
- Hours installing hardware/software for your writing tools, and tracking errors in those tools.
- Hours banking all the royalties and dealing with tax issues.
There's also the question of how to count "words." Is it words in the finished ms.? Or maybe all the words you've written in all the above activities, many of which were thrown away?
So, if you add up all these words and divide them by all these hours, you get one number for your rate. But if you're counting different words and hours, you'll get a different rate.
Is 1,500 words per hour an extra amazingly speedy rate?
It might be if you're talking about finished words appearing in print, taking into account all those other hours in a writer's business.Let's figure it out. 8 hours per day, 365 days per year, at 1,500 words per hour, would produce 4,380,000 words per year. A fairly big novel has 120,000 words, so this rate would be more than 35 such novels a year. I'd say that was amazingly speedy, but there are a few writers who accomplish something of this order. You may not realize that because they write under different names. Why? For one thing, the market won't buy novels at that rate from one author.
There are quite a few other authors who achieve this rate–but only on days they're working, and they don't work every day, or perhaps not eight hours on days they do work.
What Are Typical Words Per Hour Rates?
My reader goes on to ask: "How many words per hour or per day do you write when writing novels? Same question for others you know or for readers of your blog."For me, when I'm drafting a novel, actually typing words into my computer, I can readily type 1,500 words per hour, or 12,000 words per 8-hour day. I have, several times, knocked out a 100,000-word ms. in a solid week. But I seldom work solid weeks, or 8-hour days, typing first drafts. When you look at the entire process, the entire production, over about 40 years I've produced about one 100,000-word book per year. What that shows is that most days I'm doing other things than drafting manuscripts.
The important answer for readers of this blog is that each writer's answer will be different. My most important message to writers is that each of us must find our own writing process, the one (or ones) that work for us. And each process will have a different "rate," so don't compare yourself to others–especially don't compare your "rate" with someone's not-clearly-defined rate.
What you can compare is your own rate today with your own rate yesterday, measured the same way. If you keep track of your personal rate, you may learn things about yourself–and if you learn things about yourself, you may notice ways to improve your writing process. That's what counts, not Stephen King's or Jerry Weinberg's "rate."
