How many hours do you put into a story?

[Emotional]

My stories tend to run a little long, 20-30k words.

I just finished my latest, and realized I put about 100 hours into it.

How many hours do you put in your typical stories?

 

[Rustyoznail]

Good question. Depends on a lot of things.

One of my 750 word stories - about an hour.

The 16k story I've written for the On the Job event? Seems like forever over two years. I haven't kept a tally, but with research included I guess I'd be heading for a hundred hours.

 

[NotWise]

My last story was 32K words, and my word processor tells me it took 200+ hours. I'm not sure that's typical.

My WIP is only up to 8K words (and about 2/3 of the way done) and its at 127 hours. Not sure I believe that. A story I wrote about a year ago came together fairly easily: 10K words, 69 hours.

 

[SimonDoom]

This is a very interesting question, and I'd never thought about looking it up and in fact until now I'd never even noticed that Word provides information on how much editing time the story involved.

The problem with the Word feature is this: it apparently calculates the time by how long the document was open, not by the hours it was being actively edited. And since I'm negligent and often leave active documents open for long periods of time without even touching them, the "editing" numbers vastly overstate the amount of time I actually edited the story. So my answer is I have no idea. I tend to have a start and stop style of writing and I have documents I've worked on for literally years. Plus I sometimes save new versions of Word documents, and I believe Word only tells you how long you've been editing the particular document, not previous versions of it.

I looked up several of my stories, and the data Word provides about them, and I have no confidence that the numbers are accurate about actual writing time. I just don't know.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The fastest I've written (setting aside 750 word vignettes) was about ten hours keyboard time for my 8k Songs of Seduction - Water, include edit time. That one arrived incredibly quickly.

I've just had a look at my software program (a Word clone from OpenOffice) - I can't find a "time open" parameter on any file, so I really have no real clue. Water stood out though, because it was written in less than a week - my usual output is closer to 10k words a month.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Some, two hours, done and done. Others? Infinite and why-am-I-still-here later?

 

[KeithD]

Depends on the demands of the specific story.

 

[MrPixel]

Frankly? I don’t want to know. Whatever the total is, Im not making minimum wage with it.

 

[Seadog777]

OK, here is MY process.
I'm on-call 24/7. I'm married. I have 2 teenage daughters. Even our dog is a female (Sadie). So I'm not only outnumbered 4 to 1, but my time is limited.
I'm a Certified Referee and Judge, I teach Self-Defense classes. I'm the "neighborhood handyman". We have a lot of older farmers here in the area so if they need help; they call me and I go help them out.
I work on ONE STORY PER DAY.
Mon is one story.
Tues is a different story.
Wed is a different story.
You get the picture.
So it literally depends on what happens on that particular day.
If fuck all of nothing happens, I could spend 5 hours on a story.
If there are multiple calls in a day, I could be lucky to spend an hour on a story.

 

[NotWise]

I've just had a look at my software program (a Word clone from OpenOffice) - I can't find a "time open" parameter on any file, so I really have no real clue. Water stood out though, because it was written in less than a week - my usual output is closer to 10k words a month.

Open the file, drop down the menu from the left-most ("File") entry on the menu bar, and select "Properties..." That should be the third choice from the bottom of the menu. There's an entry on the properties page for "Total editing time."

That might vary a little depending on version, but it's been in the same place for quite a while.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I feel like 1000 words in an hour is a reasonable target when I'm in the flow. That said, I'm a plotter so a lot of the planning time is fairly intangible sitting in the car, lying in bed time.

Adding in extra time for proof-reading and editing and implementing beta-reader feedback I'm guessing a non-troublesome 6k story takes about 8 hours. I'll have to log my writing and see if that estimate is anywhere near right.

 

[Duleigh]

How many hours do you put in your typical stories?

Wow, I never checked, I don't keep a clock because I truly love writing. Lately I've been having some medical issues and I can sit with my fingers poised over the keyboard accomplishing nothing for an hour, wondering how to write myself out of a corner I ended up in. Other days I can spew out pages and pages of perfect prose and not break a sweat.

I tend to total up hours when NOT writing and consider them wasted hours.

 

[ronde]

I feel like 1000 words in an hour is a reasonable target when I'm in the flow. That said, I'm a plotter so a lot of the planning time is fairly intangible sitting in the car, lying in bed time.

Adding in extra time for proof-reading and editing and implementing beta-reader feedback I'm guessing a non-troublesome 6k story takes about 8 hours. I'll have to log my writing and see if that estimate is anywhere near right.

I would agree with that target, though I don't really pay much attention to how much I've written every day. Most of my stories range from 10k - 16k words and I write for about 3 hours every night once I have a plot established. If I get in a groove, I'll look up and see that it's one AM and I've been writing for 4 hours. Most of those stories are finished in a week with another hour or so a week later to proofread and edit.

My longest story, not yet published, is about 60k words and was written over the course of about 3 months

 

[ElectricBlue]

Open the file, drop down the menu from the left-most ("File") entry on the menu bar, and select "Properties..." That should be the third choice from the bottom of the menu. There's an entry on the properties page for "Total editing time."

That might vary a little depending on version, but it's been in the same place for quite a while.

Ta, but it's a cut back clone, cost me nothing. It has most of the Word functionality but not all.

 

[Zenith77]

I wrote and published a 15k story yesterday - about 7-8 hours, start to finish, and against a deadline because I was going away and wanted it finished before I left. It was a request from a Lit reader, and slightly out of my comfort zone, and what (even I) would call a niche fetish. It'll be interesting to see how it does.

Other than that, I really don't have an answer to this question. Most of my recent stories are in the 10-20k word range, some of them have taken hours, others, days.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Depends on the demands of the specific story.

Definitely this.

I'll also add, "the demands of the client or publisher" in some cases, but those works don't apply to Literotica.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

It hugely depends. I've done some 750s in a couple hours, and some stories around 8k in a couple days, probably with 4-6 hours all in.

Others have involved lots of research with maps, Wikipedia, air schedules, military ranks and based, going down rabbit-holes - I think I could recite every major incident of the Troubles at one point - and also months of incubating characters, trying to figure out what they might actually do in a situation. My Smoking Hot series (100k words, 14 chapters) took about 8 months, probably 2-6 hours a day for 6 months of that, say 600 hours...

Educating bloody Laura has taken way more in the thought processes, but not so much writing, so far (7 chapters/episodes done, natural break point)

 

[LisaVegas]

My stories are from my real live experiences. So, they are easy to write for me so not all that many hours. Most are in editing and to make it flow easier. My guess is 5 to 10 hours at most.

 

[oneagainst]

Hmm... 1.5h per thousand words then maybe another hour in edit and prep for publish. At 650k words so far that's 1625h or 13.5 milliHurs

 

[SirBurnInside]

My stories tend to run 11k-16k words and on average I think it comes out at around 85 to 100 hours I spend on each one.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

The first 5 part story I wrote on here only took 2 months to do. This one I’ve been working for n and off for a year. I dread to think how many hours it takes. 100 words is somewhere between 5-10 minutes and it’s gonna be about 80,000 words so 8000 times 5-10 minutes is about 666 hours.

Hey, I guess the devil does make work for idle hands.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I'm NOT a good typist. One reason is, I've never really put any effort into learning how. The second is these damn big paws of mine. So I write a paragraph and then go back and correct the mistypes, then go back again and add/subtract punctuation, then correct anything my Grammarly spots afterward. So writing takes 4x longer than I think it should. I would be very embarrassed to tell anyone how many hours I put into a story. I'm better off not even knowing myself.

 

[Lifestyle66]

My stories tend to run a little long, 20-30k words.

I just finished my latest, and realized I put about 100 hours into it.

How many hours do you put in your typical stories?

HOURS?

LOL. I type slowly, and I review and edit repeatedly. Then I copy and paste into a text-to-speech program and listen to it, repeating that process over and over ... until I'm tired of it or get fixated on writing a new story.

So, I'd be more inclined to respond in DAYS or WEEKS. My next Amorous Goods installment is due out in October, which might give me just enough time to do it right.

 

[djrip]

You guys are fast. Or, I'm slow. I might do a thousand words in a day if I'm on a roll. Generally under 500. Lots of constant rereading and editing as I go, like LS66. About a month for a story, unless it's one of the ones I tinker with off and on for years.

 

[SamScribble]

How long is a piece of string?

Sometimes a story will take me an hour or so; sometimes a story will take me a month or so.