According to Google, the average competent typist is able to write about 45 words per minute, or a whopping 2,700 in an hour. I’m a decent touch typist; nothing special, but certainly not bad. According to a quick test I took online prior to writing this piece, my speed is about 82 words per minute.
Awesome! That means I should be able to bang out a full 4-6,000 page chapter in just about an hour, right? Heck, I could complete a whole novel in less than a 40-hour work week! Why haven’t I written a dozen by now?
Well, because typing speed and writing speed are two very different things. My writing speed – the average time it takes me to actually produce a first draft of prose, since that’s the only time I can reliably measure it – is nowhere near that 82 WPM mark. In fact, it’s closer to 12. When I’m doing serious writing – even working from a script – I average 750 words per hour.
And that’s after a few years of experience. When I started, I was slow. Really slow. So slow, in fact, that it was a constant source of discouragement for me. When it took me a week or two to produce a single chapter, I would look at all the chapters I hadn’t written yet, and I would calculate how long it would take to produce the finished manuscript – even just for a first draft. At that rate, it would take me two years just to write the fifty chapter plan!
In the end, I was so discouraged with my writing speed that I often couldn’t motivate myself to write, knowing how much time it would take to produce any sizable amount of usable text. I skipped weeks – even months – and when all was said and done, it took me six years to finish the manuscript that would have taken two if I’d just kept plugging away with my glacial writing speed.
That, of course, is the lesson in this story. I paid so much attention to how slowly I was writing that I actually started producing chapters slower than I would have otherwise!
When you’re just starting out writing, there’s a lot of things that can distract you and snag you off the right path to channel your particular creative vision. Writing speed shouldn’t be one of them. If you’re a new writer, your speed is likely to improve over time as you gather confidence and find the ways that work for you specifically to do what you need to do.
But if it doesn’t, that’s not the end of the world. Writing isn’t a race. If you’re a little slower than other writers you hang out with, it doesn’t mean you’re doing a worse job, and it certainly doesn’t mean that what you produce will be any less good.
But what if I’m a fast writer?
They say you should always write what you know, and I’m not a fast writer. Going by that rule, I should just stop here, and leave my advice to the topic I’m actually knowledgeable on.
However, I don’t believe in that phrase, so I’m going to go a little further.
If you’re a fast writer, then first off, I envy you. I always wanted to be a fast writer. But I think the title of this piece still applies, and here’s why:
When you think about the speed at which you’re writing – whether positively or negatively – you’re reducing the truly important part about your writing to a single number, and not a very useful one at that. The best writing speed is always going to be the one that lets you write your best material, and you can’t do that if you’re racing yourself against an internal target, however high or low.
Find your speed, but don’t focus on it
Now, I’m not saying you should ignore your writing speed entirely. It’s a very useful thing to know, as a rough average: it’s hard to plan how much time to leave yourself, or estimate the time needed to write a chapter or manuscript, if you don’t know how fast you write.
Just make sure that it’s the last thing you’re thinking about when you’re doing the actual writing.
(as a point of interest, this 720-word piece took me 38 minutes to write. I could have typed it in 9)