Finding Your Writing Pace

In the traditional publishing world, a novel a year is an excellent pace. However, the world of indie publishing plays by a different set of rules – so writing quicker is the new name of the game. The more you write and the more books you have on Smashwords, Kindle, PubIt and other sites, the more you sell and the closer you are to financial independence from fiction writing. So, the solution is to write quickly … right?

Well, it is and it isn’t. I am still working out my writing pace, since it’s kind of a weird and individual preference. I feel if I write faster, then I won’t feel connected to the main character. I actually proved this when I wrote the final chapters of “The Heart of a Lie.” I barely remember blasting through those pages, and when I’d finished I felt a mixture of accomplishment and an odd disconnect. So, writing too fast is not fulfilling for me.

But neither do I want to spend ten years per book! I’d be old and gray with barely half a bookshelf full if I stuck to that pace. I’m glad I put in my 10,000 hours for my first novel to hone my craft, but it’s time to speed things up a little.

So, the key is to find a happy balanced timeframe between writing too fast and too slow. I want to write as quickly as I can while still maintaining that wonderful sense of familiarity with my story. Each of us is different and will try various methods for finding our magic timeframe. I’m still deep in the trenches of editing “The Heart of a Lie” and won’t be onto my next book for several weeks, but once I start I’m going to monitor my progress.

Let’s take a look at the tentative timeframes for my next novel, broken down into its individual steps:

Rough draft – I figure it will take about four to six months to write a rough draft. Those who just completed NaNoWriMo discovered you could pound out a 50,000 word draft in four weeks. But historical fiction is complicated and research-heavy, so four to six months seems a reasonable time goal. That’s about a chapter and a half a week, give or take. I usually have around 35 chapters, so 20-28 weeks sounds about right. This is a tentative guess, so I’m ballparking it.

Editing – Line by line editing is painstaking and time-consuming, but once it’s done it’s done. While editing “The Heart of a Lie,” I’ve discovered that it takes about 90 minutes to edit one chapter. So, for a 35-chapter book, that’s 52 1/2 hours of editing. A chapter a day for editing equals about five weeks.

Formatting – Formatting my novels and designing covers takes another 3-5 days. I put my story into HTML format for Kindle, convert it to PDF format for CreateSpace, and edit it according to the Smashwords guidelines. Cover design takes about 2-4 hours, maybe more. Uploading the formats to their respective websites takes another day, so the whole process is about a week.

So, a completed novel from beginning rough draft to uploading takes about seven or eight months. I’d like to start my next novel sometime in January, so I should be done by September at the latest. I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress for next year. If I could have at least one novel finished each year, then that’s a great pace. Getting comfortable with my own banging-out-stories-schedule is a big goal for me in 2012.

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What about your writing pace? Do you think my schedule is too slow or too fast? If you pushed yourself, could you write more? If you’re feeling burned-out, could you write less?

What are your writing pace goals for 2012?

Tagged as: fast writing, novel writing pace, paid author, paid writer, speed writing, writer pace, writing pace, writing quickly, writing slowly