Re: Curiosity - how fast do professional writers write?

chris_tine49@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
Alan Hope wrote:

Very good writers, writing within their fields of expertise or their
comfort zones, barely need to edit at all.

1000 words about culinaria demands virtually no research for me. My columns ran around that number each week, and were typically written in an hour or less. Flying along at 17 words a minute.

Sometimes it is just a matter of sticking some words down. Of course,
a lifetime of sticking words down prepares one for the task.


But John has established that he's a learning writer, as most of us
are.

I think your generalization is broad even among experienced writers.
But perhaps you are thinking of journalism, whereas I am thinking of
other kinds of writing.

My experience parallels Hope's. I wrote almost 90K words on this latest project in a bit over a month without really pushing hard. Missed a buncha days in there. So it was probably two weeks of actual work, edits, fixes and redoes included.

Do you ever wonder if sometimes you have fallen into familar schtick,
if your success limits you? (This is a serious question, not an attempt
to provoke.) How do you learn without failing?

The more skilled one becomes, the smaller are the failures, I think. They finally get to the point of being more like fine-tuning than the large-scale failings of rookies.

And failures need to be defined. Is it a failure when someone begins a project and partway through recognizes that it's not for him; just doesn't really suit? Is it a failure when a piece isn't bought by a publisher? What's a failure?

Pastorio
.

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