Last week I looked at how much time I spend revising vs writing vs planning. Today I’m looking at how long a short story takes me. For today’s post, “writing” includes revising and planning (but not research).
I’ve run the numbers on eight short stories, from around 500 words to more than 6000, that I’ve taken from idea to submission since I started collecting data. Longer stories do tend to take longer, but that’s not quite the full picture.
The shortest story is half the length of the second-shortest story, and took half as much time to write. But the second-shortest story didn’t take the second-smallest amount of time. That honor belongs to a story that’s nearly three times its length.
Four stories cluster around 5000 words; the time I spent on them spans a range of around 10 hours.
While it’s nice to know that I could write a short story in a week (or even a good weekend), what I haven’t looked at is how long in real time each story has taken. Sometimes the ideas ferment for a long time before I start really working on them. Sometimes I get partway into a draft that isn’t working before realizing that the story is in the mystery genre and I need to learn how to write a mystery (I’ve been listening to podcasts from Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s). In other words I still can’t say “Need story by Tuesday? Start Sunday.” But it’s good to know that I don’t know that…and that if I allot 25 hours to each short story, I’ll end up with “extra” time to spend on my novel.