I think a lot about writing speed because back before it was torn apart by sex scandals and idiotic simpering leadership, I used to participate, or aspire to participate, in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, which was (and I suppose still could be) a challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November. If you write 1,667 words per day, then on November 30 you’ll hit 50,010. So 1,667 was a magic number.
I’ve published 70 short stories and I don’t yet know how to write any that are shorter than 2,000 words, so let’s say that anything under that is flash fiction. I don’t know what the hell a novelette is, either, so let’s say that, um, 20,000 words is the threshold between a short story and a novella. My gut tells me that a novella becomes a novel at about… 35,000 words, maybe? But then again I’ve written a 33,000-word book and a 37,000-word book and they feel about the same. Anyway, so the November novels from the writing month are short but not the shortest they could be. Dean Wesley Smith said that the traditional publishing industry gradually inflated the expected word count of novels, especially for certain genres. My longest novel right now (The Taboo of the Grand Antlers) is about 66,000 words, which is as far as I felt like going.
When considering some psychological phenomena I suppose I should have explained before this post but will have to later, DWS says basically that if he’s writing in the fun, free manner that he should be, 1,000 words per hour is a good clip. And he says he is a slow typer and cycles back through what he just wrote (which he considers distinct from revision as it is during the composition of the original manuscript) for fixes, additions, deletions, and tweaks. I have no doubt he’s much better than me at reaching the correct mental state for writing, but I type much faster than he does, so I think it averages out such that 1,000 words per hour is a good clip for me, too. In fact, I would say that it is for most people.
Now for some arithmetic off the cuff. Ray Bradbury famously recommended to aspiring writers that they write one short story every week for a year for various benefits, not the least of which would be now having a nicely sized body of work. If somebody wrote for 1 hour a day at the DWS speed and took weekends off (more likely they would take weekdays off because of their day jobs, LMAO), that would be 5,000 words per week. That’s plenty for a short story. When I took creative writing workshops in college, 99% of the stories were shorter than that.
If you wrote for just 1 hour a day and didn’t take any days off (or otherwise managed 7,000 words a week), you could have a 30,000-word novella in 30 days. That means you could publish 12 books in 1 year.
I suddenly don’t feel like doing any more math. I feel like the point is made.