I've noticed that when I sit down to write (longhand), I naturally write around 500 words before I run out of steam and look up from the paper. I can write more than 500 words a day, but I do seem to naturally write in 500 word chunks. What about everyone else? Do you write in chunks of 1000 words, or 250? Or does it depend?

The idea of writing more than about half a sentence before looking up from the paper (or screen, in my case) I find quite astonishing!

R x

I don't think I often write more than a longhand page - 130 words or so - or possibly two without looking up. Whem both mood and plot are on a roll I would, but that's not so often. But I find that I definitely think in the 2000 words chunks which are a morning's work. The feeling that such a chunk is a unit of story - that by the end of the morning I've moved the characters on from where they were before - is definitely something which I find valuable. It means I sit down at 9 (or rather, play the last Scrabble move, abandon WW, and turn off the computer at nine) thinking, 'Okay, where do I/they need to be by the end of the morning?'

When I began the WIP, I was working in 1300 word chunks, and so for the purposes of counting I thought 'Okay, 10 chapters, 13,000 words per chapter, 6,500 for each narrator in each chapter' and so on. Of course, it doesn't actually come out like that - sections and chapters vary a lot. But it's very helpful to me. Now I've realised that a basic unit 2000 in a morning works better than 1300, it's fairly romping along. Whether the putative arithmetic of the next one will be different, I don't know.

Emma

It's the idea of writing longhand that amazes me. If ever I start writing anything out by hand, I get partway into it then find myself thinking, "Why am I doing this? I'll only have to transcribe it onto the computer, so why don't I write it on there in the first place?"

Plus, after so many years of writing software, my handwriting is no longer good enough for anything much beyond a shopping list, and my wrist begins to ache before I've written half a page.

But to answer the question: for me, it depends on where I am in the story, and how clear a picture I have of the scene I'm writing. Sometimes it's all coming into my head faster than I can write, and other times I have to keep stopping to work out how the scene needs to go (how much of it to do as dialogue, how much as narrative, what people need to say or do to make the story go the right way, etc.) When I get stuck, my natural tendency is to stare out of the window while I search for inspiration. I'm never staring at anything in particular: just gazing into space. It's a habit for which I used to get told off at school, but I find I need that almost-trance-like frame of mind to help me think.

One thing I've never done, though, is keep a note of how many words I've written within any timeframe.

Alex

Alex, I'm with you on staring out of the window. It's good for your eyes, too, to focus for distance fairly often.

The thing about the transcribing is that it's a process in itself, where all sorts of things which I didn't want to stop and sort out in the first draft can be sorted out. It's actually the first moment when I find out what I've got, if you see what I mean. I do find it helps to have the right pen, though: it's a biro for ease and speed, but fat like a fountain pen.

Emma

Thanks guys, that's interesting. Alex, I ditto Emma on the transcribing - it works like that for me, too. I do as much writing in the typing up as I do in the initial first drafting.
It also strikes me that when I say 500 words, I mean 500 words as counted on the computer after I've typed up. So in fact, I may have written less or more, longhand.
It's quite possible I do look up from the paper before 500 words, but I'm not conscious of it! Perhaps it's more accurate to say, after 500 words worth of typed up story, I look up thinking, 'that's the end of that scene'.
My books are obviously far shorter than Emma's, so have proportionally shorter scenes, too, I suppose.

Thinking of chunks, I've had some fairly sniffy reactions to my thinking so much in word counts: to those who believe that nothing worth having in a novel can come by any other means than a bolt of lighting, it sounds very mechanical.

But Ian McEwan says that one of the first things he knows about a novel is 'the maths' - that it'll be three parts of 20,000 words or five chapters at 10,000 each, or whatever. Because of course, actually, it's about the structure - the big piers of the bridge which hold the whole thing up. So talking about wordcounts (apart from keeping one going on the stripy sweater principle) is actually giving some kind of form and language to your creative intuitions about the structure. Einstein, similarly, said that the maths was secondary to his thinking: a way of expresing the idea, not the idea itself, which came first.

Emma

On the point about writing longhand vs. on the computer, I find it quite useful to keep copies of all of my major re-drafts of a story. It's quite common for me to rewrite a scene, then decide I liked the first version better. In that case, it's useful to be able to go back to the earlier version of the story, lift the relevant text out of it, and paste it into the current one with any necessary editing. If I wrote any drafts longhand, not only would it take longer to transcribe any text I wanted to copy, I would also have to be organised enough to know where I'd put the paper version. I find it much easier to organise computer files than paper ones.

Thinking of chunks, I've had some fairly sniffy reactions to my thinking so much in word counts

I always think it's a little odd when writers get uppity about the way another writer works. Each person has to find a way of doing things that works for them, rather than trying to follow some formulaic (or magical) way that someone else has devised. As with any skill, one listens to other people's experiences, picks up hints and suggestions, and trys to understand the received wisdom about techniques, etc. But ultimately one has to sythesise all of that into a a way of working that suits one's own way of thinking.

Alex