How fast do you write?

If I'm on point, 1000 words an hour is easily doable as I'm a fast typist. Admittedly, they won't be good words; they will require editing and review.

 

1K-2K in the right mood but I'm talking REALLY rare right mood. If I'm not inspired to write at the time I find even 100 to be hard. Depends on how your feeling that day and such.

 

Glacial.

I'm probably around 300 - 400 words per hour on average, although this can almost double sometimes—and shrink sometimes.

But there's another component to this tale. The passage of periods of writing. So I can write a good 400 words, then another 250 the next hour, and then...put it down and not come back to it for a day or two or more.

As I said, glacial.

 

First drafts when pantsing it and free writing: 800 - 1000 per hour. Following an outline or rewriting a scene with a definite outline/bullet points: 500 - 600 per hour. . . I'm terrible about stopping to edit, rethink, rewrite as I go then.

 

More like 3-400 per day. If I was writing, which I sort of am if college papers count. Otherwise...3-400 per year at the moment.

If Typo's are allowed, my speed is much faster though

 

I got 52 wpm, 5 errors, adjusted 47 wpm.

TypingTest.com - View Your Typing Test Results

 

Type? A letter a second.
Write? A tad faster.

 

My speed fluctuates a lot. When I'm in complete word-vomit mode with no regards for quality, I can get over 1500 in an hour, which I think is pretty fast, but as likely as not that would be completely unsalvageable. Yesterday I spent maybe an hour and a half on not-quite 500 words. (and I've had lower.) Speed also varies with how deep I am into a project, how much I've run through the scene in my head before putting fingers to keyboard, etc.

But that's not even taking into account how often I write, or for how long, which seems to me to be a bigger factor in how long it takes for people to actually finish projects.

Generally, I find wordcounts pretty useless for determining speed though, since it only really measures how long it takes to draft and the percentage of time on a project spent drafting vs. editing is so different from writer to writer.

 

I don't track it to be honest. 2000 words could take me 2 hours or 4, it just depends. When I calculate out when I'll have a book done, I estimate 2k per day and usually hit it. My daily goal when humming along is 2k, but I think I've hit closer to 8k one day, but that's an anomaly where I had knew what was going down and had free time to write! Which is the key. If I ever got to full time writer status, I'd probably shoot for 4-5k per day on 6-8 hours day (which would include lots of back editing)

 

That might be a little slow, but it's not glacial! I know people who only write about 50 words an hour.

 

Interesting. For me, typing speed doesn't really matter. I can type far faster than I can think of the words I want to type.

 

I think I'm medium slow (something close to to what FifthView considers glacial) and write about 500 words an hour. But what's really more important is how many hours a day and days a week you put into it.

 

Yeah, my fingers outpace my brain often, which explains all the typos and weirdness, heh heh.

 

100s of words an hour? A thousand? Are we talking typing speed or writing speed?
I can type about 50 words a minute [if I'm allowed spellcheck and auto capitalisation]. But I write at more like 500 an hour, if I'm lucky. Sometimes I'm happy with 500 words for the whole day.
For work, I have done first draft writing [you know it is going to be revised and rewritten so you are not too worried about mistakes or omissions] in the 12000+ words range. Those are tiring days when my eyes begin to ache...

 

I plod along most of the time at 600-1200 words per day - lots of pause and think and choose the words that best fit the mental vision. If energized, and the 'mental movie clips' are rolling along, I can top 1500 words a day. A few times I broke 2000 words a day. I tend to figure about a month for a novella of around 25,000 - 30,000 words. That's all for new composition.

Rewrites...suck. Real hard to maintain interest over the long haul; takes about double the time writing the first draft. Rewrite of 'Empire: Spiral' took five months, though I dabbled in other projects along the way. Another reason I am starting to prefer the novella length works - those usually don't require a full rewrite, merely edit passes, which are much, much quicker.