2000 words an hour, is it possible?

I’ve read a book called 2,000 to 10,000 How to write fast, … . The title of the book refers to the number of words an author can write in an hour. I’m having trouble making 1,000 words an hour.

Now 1,000 words an hour is 17 words a minute. Many typists can type 100 (200 or more) words a minute so it’s not a lot of words. The book makes a point that to get to 10,000 words a hour you need an outline. I have an outline. The outline gets updated often. The outline helps, but I don’t follow the outline like a railroad track, which causes the outline rewrites.

One thing that will slow you down is research. I was writing a scene today where the army was about to break in and the spies did not have the tools to break into a safe to get to the secret plan for concurring the world. So the spies have to steal the safe and run from the army. The safe plays a minor part in the story and gets mentioned many times. Calling the McGuffin a safe, a generic name, is boring. Boring the reader is bad, boring is the death of your book. So it’s time for research. How much does a safe weight (a lot), what type of safes were made in that time period (not a lot). Wiki to the rescue. Hey there’s a company that pioneered the development of safes in England. That’s where my villains happen to be. In the time period of the story. Click on a couple of pictures of old safes and I got some details (color) to add to the book.

Warning there are people out there that will jump all over your case if you mention that the safe was a Diebold. Why because Diebold did not export things until 1887 and those things were mostly bank vault doors and fixtures. Safes are too heavy to transport over seas and the British government would have purchased a safe made by a British manufacturer. No one will ever give me credit for getting it right, but lord will they jump on me if I get it wrong.

I’m getting 3,000 words out a day on a good day (those days are few and far apart). That 3,000 words includes research, spell check (which can take an hour a page, not so much the spelling but ensuring that the word I used is the right word, looking up the definition), a possible rewrite, and going back and checking that what I wrote matches to the part that came before it.

A novel is about 80,000 words. Make that 100,000 for a fantasy/science fiction novel. At 80,000 words, and averaging 2,000 words a day, that’s 40 days. Add a few days for weekends, to go watch a movie, visit friends. Not an impossible goal. Now to keep the extraneous things from interrupting the writing, and if El Nino doesn’t flood the place I may have the book done by years end.

Stay strong, write on.    Professor Hyram Voltage