The Misleading Nature of Numbers

Last year, about this time, I crossed the one million word mark for words. It’s a number I’m pretty proud of because it’s concrete. But let’s face it, numbers can be misleading.

There’s this 10,000 hour rule. Specifically, there was a study that said you need 10,000 hours of experience in something before you’re an expert at something.

I’m not gonna lie, but when I heard the 10,000 hour rule, I sort of assumed I already had that down. Just the amount of time it takes to type a million words seemed, off the top of my head, to be enough to qualify. Which of course led me to the land of numbers.

I type at approximately 60 words per minute. I have written over a million words. This is easy math. If all of those words flowed out just as fast as I could write them, then I spent ~17,000 minutes typing.

I admit, that’s not nearly as long as I thought it would be. It seems like it should have been MUCH longer. But, these are numbers, so I followed them down the rabbit hole.

17,000 minutes is just under 300 hours.

Not even a thousand hours of typing went into my books.

So yeah, with NaNo approaching, and me feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the working and what not, I think that’s a bit of an eye opener. In fact, if we knew exactly how the story went and were just taking dictation, a book could be written in just fourteen hours of typing.

0.0

I mean no novel to NOVEL in one really long day of typing?? CRAZY.

So yeah, as you’re sitting around thinking about the monumental task of going all NaNo, just remember, it’s really only something like two regular work days worth of typing to log a Novel. No big.*

And for the record, I’m not saying it’s easy, but you know, those numbers should make the task seem doable. Also, if you’re one of those people who actually write at your top typing speed, you could make the NaNo deadline by typing just thirty minutes a day for a month. How awesome is that?

If you weren’t able to put it together, I’m thinking about NaNoing this year… I haven’t decided yet. There are some other factors to look into, but I’m trying to psych myself up for it (can you tell?).

*And by No Big, I mean big―BIG―deal. Writing a novel is really hard, these numbers are really for word vomit, but I sometimes think it’s good to look at numbers to see what they can tell us. Novels are like marathons. Still, I was totally shocked at how little time is invested into the actual typing of words.

Bogged down by the middle?

I’ve found myself in the wonderful “I can’t wait to get to the end” euphoria of my novel's third act, and it made me wonder, why was the middle such a chore? I’m pretty sure everyone knows about the boggy, soggy middle of a novel (and if not, go read about them here), but for me it’s something even more than that.

The middle is our time of flux, the world isn’t settled and our futures are uncertain. I hate that time. But when I read a book, I don’t mind so much. Mostly I don’t mind because it isn’t around for any length of time. There’s only a couple hours of reading and viola, out of the middle.

As a writer, this just isn’t the case.

When I get to the middle, I can be there for weeks or even months depending on the project. It’s like this curse that you experience the book so much faster reading it than when you’re writing it, and it distorts the way writers view their work. I think this is why we get into the middle of a novel and lose faith. It isn’t because our work is bad (even though it needs to be edited), it’s because we’ve been experiencing the novel for so long that we can’t imagine anyone else wanting to spend that much time on our novel as well. And that, luckily is why I’m here to tell you: No one will spend that much time on your novel. They’ll read it in a handful of hours (maybe longer, or maybe over days or weeks), but they aren’t going to spend quite so much time with it. So take heart, no one else will spend as long in the middle.

All right, I’m hoping you wrimos and revismos are all on track, and for everyone else, Happy Thanksgiving!

NaNo personality

Strange how NaNo makes me... boring. Okay, that could be a bit dramatic, but I’ve been turning in some pretty good word counts and yet, there’s something missing:

Explosions.

I’m 9,000 words in and I have yet to explode a thing!!!

I mean that must be a record for me or something, 9,000 words without a single thing go boom? No fist fights, no ambushes, no attacks, nothing. And what’s worse, my MC has taken two baths in that time. Errgh. Well, I guess it’s a good thing the rest of the world will never see these pages.

So tell me, am I the only one who suffers from NaNo style (or a general lack thereof) when the fingers hit the keyboard?

Hello NaNo!

I’m a complete fool. No really, an utter fool. Here I am starring down a little over one hundred pages of revisions, a deadline, and NaNo???

Madness I tell you.

Well, maybe not all madness all the time. See, I’ve been working hard on this dissertation thing (see the progress bar? I’m such a big fan of progress bars!), and I think I need a little less stick and a bit more carrot in my life. So I’m doing NaNo.

I know, I said I wasn’t, but don’t worry, I’ve never actually joined NaNo and done it. I’ve Joined and procrastinated doing NaNo, or used NaNo to leverage myself into something else.

Well not this year… Or maybe exactly this year. Either way, I’ll be joining friends writing, blogging a little less, and basically, I’ll be turning my awesome book idea into a, yanno, book.

For the record, I’ll be working on The Princess Singularity. It still needs a whole back half, and that could be 50,000 words. If I get to the end and I haven’t reached 50K, then I’ll be going back to the beginning to rewrite from scratch all the things I screwed up the first time around. In short, I’m breaking the rules, but I’m a rule breaker…

Okay, I may or may not actually be such a painfully law abiding citizen that I wait at the corner to cross the street until the light changes, even when there are no cars… sometimes (read: pretty much every morning).

Right. To NaNo!

(as a side note, I think that may have just become my new battle cry).