How does everyone's work time break down?

[Crumbly Writer]

Just curious, but how do the various author's break time break down? How much time do you spend ahead of time (i.e. planning to write or doing research), how much of the total is writing, and how much is editing (i.e. what percentage of your time is spent editing vs. writing or planning?

I've never really tracked it, so I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that I spend about 10 to 20% of my time in preparation (I'll often sit on a story for months before I'm ready to act on it), about 30% writing, the rest is all editing (I take multiple passes, the final revision taking the largest effort).

Planning: 10% (I can't claim too much here, as it's all in my head, rather than in hours spent cranking it out)
Writing: 30%
Editing: 60%

[Kim Little]

Planning: 30% (I think about the story, structure, rewrites/edits I plan to do a lot)

Writing: 30% (Just the actual mechanics of writing are time consuming a bit - but once I get in the mood the text flows out)

Rewriting: 40% (Checking for continuity, spelling, word choice, clarity, tweaking bits)

[Evestrial Archangel]

Heh, planning? What's that?

No, but seriously, I don't think I could break it down into percentages. I spend time like cash because I only get about 4 or 5 hours a week to be able to write, (life is way to busy) so I try to do anything can before hand to prepare. Because if I only have $50 for one night out, I want to pregame so i can be ready to go and spend as little as possible on distractions.

I'm lucky that I work in front of a computer all day every day; I'm doing too many different things at a time to be able to write while I work, but research and planning I can do while I'm installing Exchange or migrating Active Directory. Just throw a couple extra tabs up on firefox and read / google search while I wait for something to load or pop open a txt doc and jot some notes down, then save it to bitsync folder.

So if you count it in overall hours, I'm like 89% research / planning, 10% writing, 1% editing.

Otherwise in effort it's 90% writing 9% planning / research 1% editing, but only because I can space a technically small amount of research over several days.

Editing is a special case, I can not edit my own work, I already know what it says so I'll skim over the entire thing, missing anything I did wrong. So I make use of the editor resources on SOL :-)

[Tim Merrigan]

Planing 1% (if that, I get an idea for a scene or situation, either internal (dreams usually) or external (story challenges etc.), and start writing to see where it goes)
Writing: 20(?)%
Editing: the rest. (79%)  (including transcribing if I originally wrote it out in longhand)

[ElSol]

Depends on the story.

Some stories are up to 50% planning, 25% writing, and 25% editing.

But planning in those is mostly because I get a vision of the story and have to make sense of it -- i.e. I saw two women talking down apthe street and the entire story for 'Bring Me To Life' slammed into my head... It took forever to outline because I had the whole story in my head but you can't rally write like that.

So are like 5% planning -- just a curt outline, the 45% writing, 50% editing.

[Banadin]

On Sunday, August 16, 2015 at 4:26:21 PM UTC-4, Crumbly Writer wrote:

I,m at 20% planning, 60% writing and 20% editing, but have editing help.

Next story want to be 40-40-20. Still learning.

[Crumbly Writer]

Tim, that brings up another interesting point: How many of us still write a story out longhand, and do you think it makes the story better (many authors (quite a while ago) argued that writing stories out by hand made them think about the words more as they constructed the story. Essentially, it takes so long to write, you spend more time considering the word flow.

Does anyone else, besides Tim (and my neophyte brother) write stories out longhand?

[Deadly Ernest]

G'day CW,

1. Time breakdown is impossible to work out because it varies from story to story and over time. This is because the amount of research and planning varies with what needs to be researched and how well it goes, also post completion time varies due to improved skills requiring lest revision later. Planning varies as some are fully planned at the start and have no extras added during writing, while others need a planning revision when I decide to amend the plan or add extra scenes or sub-plots or remove same.

2. Writing longhand is not my preferred option, but if away from my computer and I think of a scene or plot I want to get down 'right now' then out comes some paper and a pen and away I go. The first draft of part of Finding Home was done as eight A4 writing pad pages while waiting at the doctors because I had no laptop at that time. Also some diaries have pages full of notes for stories etc. In general I keep away from writing with a pen as I get hand cramps too easily nowdays.

Ernest

[Evestrial Archangel]

I type for the most part but fairly often write it on paper. I actually don't type any faster than I write, which might be why my hand writing is so bad...

When I do write by hand I always type it up later though. I  have piles of legal pads full of writing that will make no sense if you try to read it because its' 5 pages from one story, 2 from another 3 from the first 10 from a 3rd... not to mention that there are notes, math, formulas, sketches, and various other information thrown throughout for different stories as well.

BTW, I always do math by hand, especially physics. If I need a time frame for a flight between planets, or a deep space skirmish, all the distance speeds and time are crunched out by hand, then I check them against the computer. (I have Excel docs that put together to help me out with simple things like centrifugal forces and DeltaV, although I need to add a more complex one for dealing with the effects of gravity wells.) It's funny, I used to just eyeball math like that, until I realized that in one instance I was off on distances by a full magnitude, little difference between 10,000km and and a 100,000km right? :-) Also discovered that when I was crash course refreshing myself in basic astrophysics I was often skipping steps when plugging everything in on calculators online, so I do it by hand first and have been much more accurate.

On Sunday, August 16, 2015 at 4:26:21 PM UTC-4, Crumbly Writer wrote:

[Tim Merrigan]

It's a matter of convenience.  I don't always have a computer, or other keyboard, handy when my muse strikes.

[Crumbly Writer]

EA, I'll have to copy your cells sometime. I went to some length to describe how aliens can travel faster than light (making it central story element), but I never attempted to calculate speeds and estimate distance involved. The aliens were simply 'out there' and they had no intention of revealing how to find their home planet.

As I've mentioned before (on occasion), my brother wrote a book which was well-received (it was also beautifully polished). But he's a bit of a neophyte, terrified of the "evil TV". He wrote his entire book out longhand, rewrites it to clean it up and then a third hand so his wife can read it. She then transcribes it, and he actually edits in on the computer. Needless to say, it's a laborious effort.

When I was in high school, I took one of the last typing courses to be offered. I worked as a programmer, where I managed to crank out a lot of code, but I never tested how fast I "keyboard". When I abandoned my career, someone tested me and I scored well over 200 wpm (words per minute). I'm not about to try writing stories out long hand, but I may try my hand at writing out a chapter, just to see if it comes out any different than my usual stories. I've already demonstrated than changing my meds (for a variety of health issues) changes how I write, a recent discovery.

[Tim Merrigan]

I can understand your not writing an entire story out in longhand.  Your stories are novels.  Mine, on the other hand, are three or four pages of typescript.

[Crumbly Writer]

Ha-ha. Yeah, that's an issue. My stories run from 150,000 to 300,000 words. I've been trimming them of late, but I'm not sure whether it helps or hurts. That's a heck of a lot of legal pads!

[Evestrial Archangel]

LOL, yeah, I buy them in packs of 10. Although I'm a little disappointed, the past few that I purchased had really flimsy cardboard backings and isn't very comfortable to write on, I mean the entire thing, binding and paper too, are just much lower quality. Even the "high quality professional" pads are like that.

Sure, I can send you my physics work sheet, just let me add some notes in to make it understandable. My note taking is... eclectic.

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[Tom Frost]

My rough breakdown on Elevated:

Planning: 15 years

Writing: 6 months

Editing: 2 years and counting.

--Tom

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--Tom Frost

Enjoy my writing? Enjoy my writing about writing at http://authortomfrost.blogspot.com