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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I write very fast but that is seriously impressive. Wow. My record is a 25 page single spaced report in two marathon days. I also took the week off after that. The customer was in a hurry and we made it work but normally it goes quite a bit slower than that. When writing fiction I guess it is a bit easier, you are not going to be raked over the coals for some subtle contradiction. But still that is a massive output.

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Have to say that when writing fiction (and taking that seriously) my output slows down by a very significant factor. It's not the physical act of writing that takes time, but the time needed to think about the scene, characters, etc. I've said before that I never realised that writing (fiction) is a performance art. The performance might all be solely in your own head, but it's as real as any, and harder, because it has to make sense on the written page, in light of all that's been written before it and has yet to be written after.

eta: Writing fiction I consider myself doing really well if I achieve 500 words in an hour. Non-fiction? 1000 is quite easily done.

That's interesting. And it makes intuitive sense: when the facts are what they are there isn't much that you can do other than to translate those facts into good prose and to try to accentuate that which is important and to de-emphasize that which is not. But when you are constructing a whole world from first principles or when you have to imagine a series of events that have to be plausible it gets harder. My job is mostly constrained to avoid writing fiction!

I have never tried my hand at writing fiction, so I probably should shut up about that :) At the same time, I told / tell my kids bedtime stories that I pull out of my fantasy at the drop of a hat and they can go on for as long or as short as I want. But those are not to be compared to anything novel (or even novella) sized. 15 minutes tops.

For non-fiction, I won't say I routinely do it but if I know the topic area (no real research needed), have a bunch of quotes, have some introductory boilerplate to introduce some topic, some basic facts on e.g. a product announcement, I can crank out 1,000 words of serviceable prose in certainly a couple hours. Probably can't scale to more than about 3,000 words per day--and wouldn't want to do that on a day-in day-out basis--but I have friends who are faster so 10,000 words per day is not totally out of the ballpark.

When I was an analyst, my benchmark was about 2,000 "memo grade" words per day--typically mixed in with some phone calls, etc. More carefully constructed reports etc. took longer especially if research were involved.

I just did a check on that document, here are the stats, apparently it was a few more pages than I remembered:

Pages 31 Words 17212 Characters 97347 Characters excluding spaces 80354

Unfortunately I can not find exact statistics on the writing activity. So that's roughly within the ballpark of your maximum. I was pretty happy with this particular report and so was the customer, but to do that kind of thing sustainably would be beyond me.

Edit: and, more so because this was before COVID and that hit me pretty hard.

That's a lot. I could probably do it given the right materials in a couple days but it would really be pushing things and, like you, I'd be taking a break afterwards.

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