How fast can you type?  I think when I’m really on a roll and I have cooperation from my fingers, I clock in around 70 words per minute, but there’s usually a few typos in there.  On average, I am about 60 wpm.

So when you sit down to write a novel, you’d think you could really pound those words out, wouldn’t you?  Nope, I did 1,325 words in the first hour of the morning on November 1, the first hour of NaNoWriMo.  That’s about 28 words a minute, which shows how much of my time is spent thinking about what I’m writing.

Some people are already over half-way to the 50,000 word goal on the first day and I’ve heard that one person actually does the full 50,000 in a 24 hour stretch on the first day.  I’m not sure how they do it, but they are truly amazing writers.

I wrote over 5,000 words total on the first day and I am proud of that because I’ve never written that many words in one day.  But at the end of the day, my brain was tired, literally.  More than the extreme typing trick to write even 24,000 words in one day is the strain on a brain that isn’t used to continuously tying words and plots together to keep that kind of momentum going.

Of course, there is the “just write” mentality behind the writing that’s going on and some people just throw down words and ideas and keep going, which is fine in this situation.  The objective is to get 50,000 words towards your new novel, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be the best words or even words that will ultimately end up in the novel.

My own objective is to have the first draft be the base for a novel that will be revised a few times, polished and published later.  So even though I’m writing as fast as I can, I want to feel that the story is following my outline, somewhat, and will be something I can work with later to get a publishable book.  I am already cringing at some of the phrasing and word choices as I write them, but I know they will be changed later.  The essence of the scene is down and it will be refined with the next draft.

So, I’ll try not to babble about this project too much over the next few weeks, but it is consuming my thoughts at the moment.  I will put up a chart, because I like to do them, next week of my week’s word count, but I will talk more about either the novel I am writing or the one I just finished the first draft on last week.

To anyone reading, thanks for following along with me and please feel free to subscribe and comment about my posts or ask questions.