How long would it take to write a novel if you wrote 1,000 words/day? 500? 100? How about three sentences per day? How long would that take?
I'm going to figure out some answers here. I'll start with the basic assumption that the length of a complete novel is 100,000 words. At 250 words/page, that's a 400 page book.
Let's see how long it would take to complete the first draft, sans edits, given varying rates of words put down on paper per day. I'll assume a completely arbitrary 20 words per sentence and, from that, 12.5 sentences/page (250 words/page divided by 20 words/sentence).
| |
Words to
Paper/Day |
How Long
in Days |
How Long
in Years |
| 1 word |
1 |
100,000.00 |
273.97 |
| 5 words |
5 |
20,000.00 |
54.79 |
| 20 words/1 sentence |
20 |
5,000.00 |
13.70 |
| 2 sentences |
40 |
2,500.00 |
6.85 |
| 3 sentences |
60 |
1,666.67 |
4.57 |
| 5 sentences |
100 |
1,000.00 |
2.74 |
| 10 sentences |
200 |
500.00 |
1.37 |
| 1 page/12.5 sentences/250 words |
250 |
400.00 |
1.10 |
| 2 pages |
500 |
200.00 |
0.55 |
| 3 pages |
750 |
133.33 |
0.37 |
| 4 pages |
1000 |
100.00 |
0.27 |
| 5 pages |
1250 |
80.00 |
0.22 |
| 10 pages |
2500 |
40.00 |
0.11 |
| 20 pages |
5000 |
20.00 |
0.05 |
| 40 pages |
10000 |
10.00 |
0.03 |
| 50 pages |
12500 |
8.00 |
0.02 |
Starting at the ridiculous and ending with, well, the ridiculous again, you can see that were you to only write 1 word/day it would take 100,000 days or 274 years to finish a novel length manuscript. Something a little more realistic—3 sentences/day, of which I've heard of writers doing—and you're at 4.5 years. If you strive for the more often recommended 1,000 words/day, it will take you .27 years or just over 3 months. Pause for a second and think about that. My first reaction was: What?! Why has it taken me so long then to finish this bleep'in novel then? That just can't be right…
But it is.
If you can write 1,000 words per day, you'll have a 100,000 words in 100 days. A complete first draft, in other words.
It sounds easy. So why isn't it? The reasons are many: life gets in the way, we procrastinate, we edit/rewrite before we should, the writing itself leads us down dead-ends from which we have to back ourselves out. Anyone's who's ever attempted to write a novel, whether you failed or not, knows about these things. It takes a lot of discipline to keep pushing forward, especially when you know what you just wrote is crap and is going to need some serious re-writing.
But therein lies the gist of it: you have to keep moving forward if you want to reach the end. It sounds simple. If only it really were.
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