{"id":957,"date":"2012-08-08T15:00:25","date_gmt":"2012-08-08T20:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/?p=957"},"modified":"2012-08-08T11:30:22","modified_gmt":"2012-08-08T16:30:22","slug":"writing-stats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/08\/writing-stats\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Stats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way back in April, Jay Lake posted some numbers<\/a> that revealed he’d spent about 36% of his time on his first draft and 43% of his time revising.<\/p>\n

And I thought, wow, only 40% revision! How nice! I assumed my percentage was higher, but never got around to doing the math.<\/p>\n

Then recently, I found this other blog post on the three phases of writing<\/a> that said “Writing is 85% prewriting, 1% writing, and 14% rewriting.” I read that and thought, that can’t be right. Where’s your data?<\/p>\n

Well, I have data. I’ve been tracking my writing time for about two years. And it turns out…only a third of my time has been spent on the miserable part (revising). Since mid-2010ish, I’ve spent about 19% of my time planning, 48% writing, and 32% revising. I guess I should stop complaining. Revising must feel like it takes 90% of my time because I hate it so much. <\/p>\n

It’ll be interesting to look back at these numbers in a few years and see what my longer-term average is, since the numbers have been in a wide range. In 2011, for example, only 9.6% of my time was on planning, and so far in 2012, only 22% of my time has been writing (a percentage that is about to increase drastically, since I’m now writing the book I spent the beginning of the year planning). <\/p>\n

I don’t have numbers for a full book start-to-finish (I started tracking halfway through my last book). But stay tuned next week when I’ll run the numbers on individual short stories. (Preview: Length of story? Not so important.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Way back in April, Jay Lake posted some numbers that revealed he’d spent about 36% of his time on his first draft and 43% of his time revising. And I thought, wow, only 40% revision! How nice! I assumed my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}