I am a writing machine!
I just finished up some documentation for my last gig. 9,700 words; 41 pages; 12.5 hours. That’s 776 words / hour — solidly above my 500 w/h average. I love when it flows. (Yes, as you can tell from the word to page count ratio, it was procedural docs, thus lots of whitespace).
Comments
Was that technical documentation, or creative? You say that it's procedural, but it makes me wonder what the gig entailed (broadly). In any case, that's a lot of hourly writing!
Posted by: Dave Schappell | January 27, 2008 08:03 PM
In this case, it was technical: I was brain dumping documentation describing the work I did at my last startup (www.lilipip.com). The fact that it was a brain dump was the advantage here. I wrote the outline and then just needed to fill in the blanks. I've found that with technical writing, if I'm not able to write fast, it's because either 1) I don't know the material well enough yet, so go back and learn, or 2) I don't have a solid outline.
Creatively, I've written at about 500 words/h when it's really good and it feels like I'm just taking dictation for the story that's whispering itself in my ear. I've also spent three hours on one sentence (I've yet to learn when to give up).
Posted by: Rob | January 27, 2008 08:26 PM