Timed writing challenge

[freeradical9]

The short fics that have been put up at saiyuki_time ever since the first challenge prompt went up on Wednesday have really been quite impressive--not just in the number being posted, but also in the level of quality overall. It impresses me that the plotlines are so coherent, given the speed with which the story has to be written, and the absence of time to edit much at the end.

There seems to be quite a bit of variation in story length. So, having an inquiring mind and being the geek that I am, I took a look at the fics for which exact times had posted and calculated a "writing rate" (average number of words per minute) for each story. Editing time (if specified) is included, to reflect the thought process involved, and not just typing speed.



For the "Rebirth" prompt, 30 minute time limit

1 writer at 8 words/min
1 writer at 9 words/min
2 writers at 12 words/min
1 writer at 15 words/min <----this is freeradical9--a happy median!
1 writer at 20 words/min <----chomiji, you are here!
1 writer at 26 words/min
1 writer at 27 words/min

Numerical mean=16 words/min


For the "First times" prompt, 60 minute time limit

2 writers at 6 words/min
1 writer at 8 words/min
1 writer at 9 words/min
2 writers at 11 words/min
3 writers at 12 words/min
1 writer at 13 words/min
2 writers at 14 words/min
1 writer at 15 words/min
1 writer at 17 words/min
2 writers at 18 words/min <---chomiji, here you are, again! ^_^ (Hey, can I borrow some of your speed?)
1 writer at 20 words/min
1 writer at 22 words/min

Numerical mean=13 words/min

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Count me as another one of the mental-incubator types. My usual writing pattern is to spend anywhere from days to months chewing over the idea, writing out chunks of it in my head until I've got the structure and the POV and the basic rhythm of the sentences down. When I finally sit down to put it to paper (well, pixels, these days), the story generally comes out all in one sitting -- the only times I've had to split a work into sessions is when I've started so late and worked so long that I wind up too sleepy to finish. Revision is usually fairly minimal and more of the nitpicky tweak-single-words-and-punctuation sort, since I've more or less done the drafting-and-editing stage all in my head; the only time I've ever really struggled with rewrites was in a particularly complex Avatar fic where I didn't want to admit I was trying too hard to jam two separate stories' worth of incidents in a structure that only had room for one. When I finally admitted to myself that I was more in love with the tricky layered structure than fighting to get in all the mismatched scenes, and just sliced it all in half, everything fell together smoothly.

Funnily enough, though, the piece that's come the fastest and smoothest of anything I've done to date is the most atypical -- it's comedy, and was done almost totally spur-of-the-moment with none of the usual lengthy pre-chewing of ideas. I'd been joking around in chat with a friend about how some characters she was doing might react in a particular scenario, and we both wound up cracking up so hard that I thought "OK, I'm going to write this up as a drabble, it'll be a quick laugh I can get typed out before bed." But when I started to set it down the situation just sort of organically got more and more detailed and ridiculous, and somehow before I knew it the sun was up and I had a 5,000+ word sex farce on my hands. *boggles*

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

I noticed in the intro of your recent fic that it had been one that had been mulled over for a bit. It's really nice that it started with that vivid, strong image to anchor it. I'm curious (since we're comparing writing notes) how often do you jot ideas on the "back of a napkin". I'm constantly scribbling down bits of dialogue and pieces of phrase into notebooks so that I don't loose the wording (If I hoard something just in my head, I forget what I was going to write!)

Actually, I find it very impressive that you can manage to get something out all in one sitting. No matter what I write, it nearly always takes *days* and sometimes months. Part of that may be due to lifestyle, of course (I rarely have more than a few hours at a time to work on writing uninterrupted). But probably also part of it is that I keep going back to poke at stuff. The end result is that turns it into something of an evolutionary process. ^^

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I scribble things down on-the-run constantly when I've got sewing/jewelry/etc. designs in mind that I'm trying to plot out, or taking notes throughout the day for a perfume review...but I can't seem to do that with fic, oddly enough. I used to try, but that seemed to bring out my version of the can't-go-back-to-things issue Cho is talking about below. Somehow, once I get things down in black-and-white, if they're in anything but a near-finished form it really triggers the most horrifically self-critical side that thinks everything I do is utterly trite and needs to be destroyed now before I get any more embarassed by it. Keeping the drafting strictly mental somehow lets me do an endrun around that tendency.

The downside of this is of course that if I don't sit down and make the time to write when something has hit the end of that mental composition cycle, and instead get distracted by something new and shiny, I do lose all the specific turns of phrase I might have had and will have to start all over again. It's not a total loss as the plot outline is still there, but the dialogue and POV stuff has to be redone. I'm in that pickle with the companion piece I had in mind to go with The Lost and Found right now -- I was just about ready to work on that one when the kink meme came along and distracted me with the hair-fetish prompt, and now I have to sort of think my way backwards and find that particular awkward voice again. Ah well, it's not the worst thing to have back-burnered I suppose, after that last bit of amateur dentistry without anesthetic it'd be a nice change to work on something a bit more hopeful.

The single-setting thing doesn't seem all that impressive to me because most of my fics really aren't that long, and while I've never timed my usual WPM I know it's definitely higher than what I managed here for the timed prompt! Generally it seems to be somewhere in the ballpark of a few hours for stuff in the low-to-mid thousands word count. If I were better about being able to put things down and pick them up again, maybe I'd have some longer pieces under my belt!