{"id":959,"date":"2012-08-15T15:00:05","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T20:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/?p=959"},"modified":"2012-08-15T12:54:20","modified_gmt":"2012-08-15T17:54:20","slug":"short-story-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/15\/short-story-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Story Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Four stories cluster around 5000 words; the time I spent on them spans a range of around 10 hours. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … 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_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-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","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=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}