typing speed and wrting output

[Comshaw]

I'm curious and I'd like to ask ya'll two questions:

1) What's your accurate typing speed?

2) When you're hot on a story, how much (word count) can you accomplish in one day?

I know I'm slow, painfully so. I know I'm way down toward the bottom on these two things, but I have no idea where the average or the top of the heap is.

I pound the keyboard with two fingers at a speed of 18 to 20 words a minute. I never wanted to learn the touch method of typing way back in my youth and by the time I wanted to an injury percluded that possibility so typing the way I do is how it will always be.

Couple that with mild dyslexia which causes continual corrections of typos and misspelled words and I can produce about 1000-1500 words a day. I get it done, but it's a plod rather than a sprint for me. So what about you? Where are you on that scale? Down here on the bottom with us plow horse plodders or towards the top with the thoroughbreds?

Comshaw

 

[NotWise]

I'm curious and I'd like to ask ya'll two questions:

1) What's your accurate typing speed?

2) When you're hot on a story, how much (word count) can you accomplish in one day?

I don't know what my typing speed is now. I'm a touch typist, so I'm probably faster than most. I topped out at about 44 words/minute in typing class when I was fourteen, but I've been able to work faster since then.

Hot on a story, I think I've written as much as 20,000 words in a day, but that was ten+ years ago and it all had to be rewritten. A few hundred words/day is more normal, and a couple thousand is a good day. I do lots of stopping, correcting, and retyping.

 

[HeyAll]

I don't know the speed, but in a great day, I can type upwards of 1,500 words. That's for the sex scene, which is easier than the build up. Usually I try to write a few hundreds words, if that. It depends on how many ideas I have.

Here's an interesting article of famous authors and their word count.

https://wordcounter.net/blog/2017/12/04/103207_the-daily-word-counts-of-19-famous-writers.html

Michael Crichton (Jurasic Park) wrote 10,000 words per day. He's a doctor who's written many long novels.

If I was that smart, my profile would be loaded with sex stories. lol

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

I'm a very fast typist. On https://10fastfingers.com
I can consistently punch out 130 words per minute. But this has no bearing on how fast I work on a story.

The fastest I've ever written was a 6k first draft that was done in 4 hours which comes to 25 wpm.
But I've also spent an entire year on a 12k word first draft.

My goal has always been at least 1000 words per day. Most days I meet that goal. Sometimes I can do it in half an hour. Sometimes it takes me an entire hour to eke out 100 words.

 

[lovecraft68]

I only use three fingers to type

But they're fast dammit. I don't know how many words I can type, doesn't concern me. But when hot on a story I have good focus and stamina. I've done 8k so far today on one and will clear ten before my eyes get tired which is what generally stops me.

Best I ever did that I recall was 30k on a Saturday from the morning til around midnight. That was 10 years ago and I don't think I could do that again.

All averages out with those frustrating nights where I can barely get out a few hundred usable words.

 

[TadOverdon]

I haven't tested my typing speed in decades. No help there.

There are days that I can do 1200 words, but they're rare. Often now I'm lucky to get 300. Neither extreme has anything to do with my WPM.

 

[ElectricBlue]

My fastest as a six finger typist on a keyboard was 100 wpm with 98% accuracy (decades ago). Couldn't do that now, though, because I mostly use a Kindle screen keyboard with hunt and peck.

My productivity over the years has been fairly consistent around 12k -15k a month, which works out around 300 - 500 good words a day, fully edited, ready to use.

 

[PennameWombat]

I'm curious and I'd like to ask ya'll two questions:

1) What's your accurate typing speed?

2) When you're hot on a story, how much (word count) can you accomplish in one day?

<snip>

Comshaw

Utterly, totally, completely and without reservation these are unrelated. They have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with each other.

For the first, when I was last measured/tested, back in the day on an electric typewriter transcribing written text, so, knowing what I was typing (we were given a cleanly handwritten sheet, but hadn't seen it before), I could do 70 WPM[1], with essentially no errors. I was one of two boys in my late 1970s high school typing class. Why? My WWII vet dad said "Learn to type, the army always needs clerks." He didn't say the "they tend not to get shot at" part. Never went in the Army, but spent my life at keyboards dealing with software.

I haven't measured myself on a computer, and I know I'm not at my peak. For one thing, per the OP, my fingers don't all work correctly anymore either. But, if I'm typing known text, I'm still damned fast.

But to the second point. The best I've done is a 15,000 word story, from first thought to submission, in three days. So. That's 5,000 words per day. That included a couple of thorough readings and revisions. But since no way did I spend 24 hours at it, that still breaks down to typing somewhere around 20 to 30 words per minute at best.

And that was freak time. But. I still had to think and create the words.

I do not handwrite my stuff. Because that is even slower and more painful than typing. So that wouldn't speed me up at all. But just because I can do 50+ WPM I'm not going to whip out stories in a day or two.

[1] It was a long time ago. It may have been 68 or 69 and not exactly 70 in the formal test... but I was near the top of the class at the final tests.

 

[astushkin]

On a non-workday, I aim for 1500 words, which I usually achieve. With my current novel I'm trying something new: voice recognition software. My productivity is about the same as typing, but there is the added benefit of unexpected entertainment. For example, instead of "a hoarse groan escaped him," it wrote "a horse grown escaped him." Instead of "exploring the mysteries of Eros," it wrote "exploring the mysteries of euros." (Now my favorite way to proposition my spouse.) It's not doing very well with the graphic descriptions of sex, so I'm either training it with words I anticipate using more often, or typing those scenes.

 

[Athalia]

When I was in college, I was typing maybe 65 words per minute. I'm not that fast now, but I'd guess that, with a good keyboard, I can probably clock in at around 50.

As for output, I don't measure it in words, but in stories. Some are short, others not so short.

 

[TadOverdon]

FWIW, I was in the high 60s on a desktop PC click-clack keyboard the size of Kansas. I imagine it's less on the laptop, even after years of experience.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

I have been typing for a very long time and I am slow and hopeless.

I reckon I have written about 920k words for Literotica. Just short of one million.

If I had written them in pencil, I would have used a thousand erasers. In pen, I'd have used a swimming pool full of Tippex.

I must have written almost double that number of words, the amount of corrections I need to make. My fingers are shorter, my keyboard is in tatters.

And I have just added to the misery typing this response.

 

[LAHomedog]

I'm a touch typist and can go 70+ per minute, but that has nothing to do with my writing speed. It depend upon whether I have the story worked out in my head, or just the concept and the opening.

Sometimes I will have the entire story already plotted out in my mind before I start. That would be the concept, the characters, the story beats, the cold opening, the first line of the story, plot point one, and the ends of the acts. Then my writing is very fast.

Sometimes it is just the concept and the opening and the characters. When that is the case, I let the charactesr tell me what the story is as I write it. That is slower.

 

[SamScribble]

I can type at about 70 words per minute. But I write at about 1,000 ready-to-go words a day.

 

[mynameisben]

I can type about as fast as I can creatively author, and that's always been fast enough for me.

But no, I never did learn how to touch type.


Ben

 

[Comshaw]

Utterly, totally, completely and without reservation these are unrelated. They have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with each other.

For the first, when I was last measured/tested, back in the day on an electric typewriter transcribing written text, so, knowing what I was typing (we were given a cleanly handwritten sheet, but hadn't seen it before), I could do 70 WPM[1], with essentially no errors. I was one of two boys in my late 1970s high school typing class. Why? My WWII vet dad said "Learn to type, the army always needs clerks." He didn't say the "they tend not to get shot at" part. Never went in the Army, but spent my life at keyboards dealing with software.

I haven't measured myself on a computer, and I know I'm not at my peak. For one thing, per the OP, my fingers don't all work correctly anymore either. But, if I'm typing known text, I'm still damned fast.

But to the second point. The best I've done is a 15,000 word story, from first thought to submission, in three days. So. That's 5,000 words per day. That included a couple of thorough readings and revisions. But since no way did I spend 24 hours at it, that still breaks down to typing somewhere around 20 to 30 words per minute at best.

And that was freak time. But. I still had to think and create the words.

I do not handwrite my stuff. Because that is even slower and more painful than typing. So that wouldn't speed me up at all. But just because I can do 50+ WPM I'm not going to whip out stories in a day or two.

[1] It was a long time ago. It may have been 68 or 69 and not exactly 70 in the formal test... but I was near the top of the class at the final tests.

Thanks for your take on this.
I need to disagree with your opening statement.

As far as related to one another, if you stop and consider that the skill (in this case typing) we have in a particular discipline (writing) can (and in many cases does) impact the output of the product, they are very closely related. However, like all things it doesn't mean skill is the determining factor for that output, but can be a huge and important contributing factor.

Comshaw

 

[Deleted member 5521640]

I can type fairly fast I think, but I haven't tested anytime recently how many words per minute I can put out. I do know some stories I write go faster than others. Some stories I can't seem to type fast enough to get the words out they come out of me so quickly. Yet others are painfully slow

 

[SimonDoom]

I learned two-hand typing in high school, but I didn't get reasonably proficient until I used a word processor every single day for work. I still use it every single day, sometimes for work and sometimes for writing stories. My typing speed with mistakes is well over 60 words a minute, but my error rate is high enough that the real functional rate is probably around 50 and I'm paying attention and trying to be careful. I still have to look at the keyboard for some of the symbols.

I still like writing by sitting at a Windows-based desktop computer and using MS Word. That's all I ever do. I use no other media or formats to write erotica. That makes it easier to remain reasonably proficient with typing.

I'm all over the map when it comes to writing speed. Some days I write nothing. If I'm really cranking I can write about 8000 words in a day -- at least two Literotica pages and probably then some.

 

[SimonDoom]

Thanks for your take on this.
I need to disagree with your opening statement.

As far as related to one another, if you stop and consider that the skill (in this case typing) we have in a particular discipline (writing) can (and in many cases does) impact the output of the product, they are very closely related. However, like all things it doesn't mean skill is the determining factor for that output, but can be a huge and important contributing factor.

Comshaw

I think it might make some difference if one was a really, really terrible and slow typist -- so slow that it held up the pace of one's composition. But at my speed, maybe around 40-50 functional wpm, it would make no difference if I typed faster, because I wouldn't be able to compose that fast. That's pretty fast for composing. If you composed that fast you would complete a book page in under 10 minutes, and a Literotica page in less than an hour and a half.

 

[TadOverdon]

I use MSWord to write, with the free Grammarly plug-in. That and the built-in checks are nice as-you-go aids to have. I can submit manuscripts to Smashwords, using Word, without any additional formatting steps.

I cut-and-paste from Word into literotica's editor, and then have to re-add tags for italics and occasionally bold and centering. It's a bit of a pain but faster than uploading a file and waiting for it to be converted for posting.

 

[KeithD]

I don't know what my actual speed was in taking a test for government employment, but the the requirement was 45 wpm, and I passed. When electric typewriters came into use, they couldn't keep up with my manual typewriter speed. And then, when I wrote my initial novels in the Mediterranean, I was using a Magnavox closed-system word processor, and that couldn't keep up with my composing speed. I think being a good touch typist is important to creative writing--one part of the process that doesn't bog you down if your typing can keep up with your mental composition.

 

[rjordan]

I'm curious and I'd like to ask ya'll two questions:

1) What's your accurate typing speed?

For something you intend to edit several times, accurate typing speed is kinda irrelevant. If you're taking time to fix typos on a draft, you're just wasting your time. Fix all that crap next time you edit. Which if you're any good at all will be many times.

Reasonable typing speed (with errors) is anything that doesn't bottle up your thinking. If you brain is looking for keys, you brain isn't creating the story. Rather than speed, I'd strive for being able to type without ever looking at the keys. That's a far more useful skill for a writer than accurate typing at high speed.

I've worked with a lot of professional writers on magazines and in job shops over many decades. Most were probably in the 40-50 wpm range. A surprising number used two or three fingers--none of the asdf ;lkj 10 finger magic.

The most demanding writing I ever did was on a laptop projected on a large screen in an auditorium full of service managers for an Asian automotive manufacturer. They shouted out topics to me, I composed on the fly, then accepted edits shouted by the same group. After a final edit alone, the manual went to press that afternoon. Being able to type really fast with few errors was an advantage then, but that's about the only time I've found it all that useful.

There are many more important skills a good writer acquires than fast typing.

rj

 

[Rustyoznail]

My typing speed is faster than my brain thinks of lines for a story.

 

[SexualisPhantasia]

I always log my progress on stories. My average is about 600 words an hour.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm curious and I'd like to ask ya'll two questions:

1) What's your accurate typing speed?

89 wpm according to https://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english.

2) When you're hot on a story, how much (word count) can you accomplish in one day?

On a really good day, maybe 3k words, but that would be exceptional. I rarely have a full day to spend writing. I've been here almost 10 years and I have about 300k words posted here, which averages out at about 80 words/day. But then there are large chunks of time when I'm not working on a story.