Good question!  I, uh, don’t actually know.  XD  It’s really all over the place for me.  And also, it’s not really as straightforward as sitting down and producing text.

Sometimes (like on the prompts I’ve been filling for followers) I can sit down and spit out a thousand words in the course of a couple of hours.  This is usually easiest with a short story (under 2000 words) or at the beginning of a long story, before I get a point where I’ve got enough background built up that I need to worry about keeping everything in my head and still making sense.  That slows me down.  A story of 2000 words or so, I can crank out in a day or two.  If it’s around 3000 words, it might take me a week or two.  6000 words or more, and my time frame can easily bounce up to over a month.

I think this is because the longer the story is, the more I have to keep going back over it and trying to make everything fit.  I can’t hold a story of over 3000 words all in my head at once.  Over 6000 words, and at that point, more of my time and effort is going into keeping the story coherent than is going into producing text.  At that point, some days I barely produce any new writing at all, and my time is all tied up in fixing existing things in the story.  I’m not a person who writes from start to end, and then goes back to revise in waves.  I write from start to wherever I come to a writer’s block in the story, then go back and revise what I’ve got till I figure out what I’ve done that is thwarting me and fix it.  This can take me days or even weeks.

When I’m revising, I really haven’t tracked how much writing I’m producing that way.  But I know that it’s still quite a bit, because I’ll hit a brick wall on a story, go back and tinker with what I’ve already got, and then the next time I think to check the word count a few days later, the thing is 1000 words longer than it was.  Which is funny, because I also know that my first drafts are often bloated and get trimmed WAY down once I start revising.  I’ll distill entire paragraphs down into a sentence or two, and chop out entire forests of prepositional phrases, and then add bits here and there, and then I’m startled when suddenly scrolling through the story takes longer than it used to.

I feel like that doesn’t help much.  But I hope that it provides some insight, at least.

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