Stats on my work in progress
Stats on my work in progress
Fun stats about my current work in progress | A friend of mine told me that I should find out how long it takes me to draft a novel. So I tracked my time...
Stats on my work in progress
reading time: 2 minute(s)
A friend of mine told me that I should find out how long it takes me to draft a novel. So I tracked my time (using Toggl) and logged my word count and time (using AirTable) and came up with the analysis below based on those stats.
My friend recommended this because I was
- Too in my head about the novel I have been working on for years and years
- Needed to try something new (“Can I even write a new story?”)
- Needed to try something easier (One POV, a simple story and plot)
Stats!
I started outlining this new book on 2021-03-31. Over the span of 9 days, I outlined for 6:55. I re-outlined at various points during the first draft, for a total of 3 days, for 3:35. Outlining in total took 10:30.
I wrote for 51 hours over the span of 50 days between 2021-04-13 and 2021-12-28 (from April to December). This means out of 258 days, I wrote for 50 of them. The biggest lulls happened in June (2 sessions), July (3 sessions), and August (0 sessions). October had 11 writing sessions and December (the last month of the first draft) had 14 writing sessions.
I wrote a total of 46,000 words. At my slowest, I wrote 420 words per hour; at my fastest, 1694 words per hour (excluding weird outliers). An average session yielded 940 words and was 1:02 long. My longest session was 4:26 on November 22, yielding 4356 words (with a 982 word/hour rate, on the average side). My shortest session was 10 minutes. This October 27 session yielded 317 words.
Don’t ever think you can’t sit down and write for 10 minutes.
Including outlining, I worked on this book for 60 days for a total of 61.5 hours.
Conclusion
The second draft will definitely be longer since 46,000 words is pretty short, but this will likely just include adding descriptions, fleshing out interactions, and adding new scenes rather than any restructuring of the plot. A welcome change from the fantasy epic I’ve been working on since I was a teenager.
I have started outlining a new novel as well since I had an idea while I was writing this one. Since I saw I could write 46,000 words in 61 hours, I thought surely I can do that faster than 258 days.