How many hours a day do you write?

[DivaNicoletta]

How many hours a day do you write generally?

[Jamesaritchie]

How many hours a day do you write generally?

Five. Two and a half in the morning, and then two and a half more after lunch and a long walk.

[DamaNegra]

About six, two to write and four to procrasinate :D

[SusanR]

Two pages. Plus research. Turns out to be roughly two to three hours a day. I'm hoping to get more writing time within the next couple of weeks, when we buy my teens their own computer. I often WANT to write after dinner, but I have trouble getting computer time then....the kids either need to use it for schoolwork or iTunes. I suspect it's more of the latter.

If I can get that second patch of time in, I'd write three, maybe four pages a day. I am pretty much wiped out mentally after those two pages, so who knows if anything I produce after that would even be worth keeping.

I really don't set my quota by the clock. I set it by the page.

SusanR

[JerseyGirl1962]

How many hours a day do you write generally?

Hours? Eh. Since I work a lot of hours here at work (blah), I'm not prone to keeping track of the time. I take a few minutes here, maybe an hour there, so it's hard to say.

I am writing on a more consistent basis, which is more than I could say in the past.

~Nancy

[Shadow_Ferret]

Hours? You're kidding, right?

If I can string a half hour of constant writing I'm doing good.

Hours. That's a good one. :)

[James D. Macdonald]

Two.

[Richard White]

Normally, two hours a day.

Mainly between 9:30-11:30 at night (after the family has gone to bed).

Course, lately, it's been writing class work rather than novels, but writing is writing is writing.

Somedays I get a little extra writing in if work is slow. Sometimes, I do stuff with the family and skip my evening writing.

But, as I said, normally, two hours a day.

[My-Immortal]

It depends on how much my little guy sleeps and how little I spend online. :)

Usually I can get anywhere from two to five hours of writing a day - unfortunately, it's not all at the same time or even the same time every day.

Take care. Good luck with making the time to write and your future writing endeavors.

[scarletpeaches]

One on a bad day, two on a good one. I can get a couple of thousand in that way; more if I'm editing rather than composing.

Poetry, well, I don't count the time I spend with that as I can write in my little notebook on the bus, at my dad's house, wherever...it's not as structured as my prose schedule.

[CaelinPaul]

I have had stints of 16 hour writing days, unfortunately they might only fit into my schedule every 365 days :)

[SeanDSchaffer]

It depends on how I'm feeling physically. I try to write at least a chapter a day, which would roughly translate into an hour. Many times I will write four or five chapters in one day. Again, each chapter translates roughly into one hour for me.

Lately I've been really weak and haven't been able to sit in front of my keyboard very much. That, however, is changing as my body is starting to get back into the swing of things; I imagine I'll be writing two or three hours a day regularly pretty soon.

[aadams73]

Four. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. Before and in between, I take my puppy out for a walk and a ball game.

[jules]

Depends on how much other work I'm doing. The last few weeks, I've been lucky to hit half an hour a day. Late last year when I was between projects I was doing about 3 - 4.

[Novilia]

Almost whenever I can! I can't do it too early or too late or else I get tired and my work suscks, but if I am into it, thou shalt have to remove the keyboard from my cold dead fingers!

Muhahaha!

[Novilia]

By-the-by do you guys actually say to yourselves, "Okay, I have to work for three hours." That sounds kind of annoying. Am I the only one who just does it whenever the urge calls me?

[Jamesaritchie]

By-the-by do you guys actually say to yourselves, "Okay, I have to work for three hours." That sounds kind of annoying. Am I the only one who just does it whenever the urge calls me?

Do you only go to work when the urge calls you?

This aside, the urge calls when I tell it to call, and writing is a habit. And if the urge doesn't call me, I'll call it. My muse had better show up each and every time I sit down to write. My muse knows where I'll be, and when I'll be there, and if he isn't there at the same time I am, his butt gets fired.

I never say "Okay, I have to write five hours today." I do say, "Yes, I get to write five hours today." I enjoy writing. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't be a writer. Writing for five hours isn't a punishment, it's a reward.

And since I am a writer by choice, I do those things most likely to guarantee success, and regular writing is one of those things. The more you write, the better you get. The more you write, the more you produce. The more you write, the faster you get the million words of garbage out of your system.

Writers write, and the one thing most successful writers have in common is the desire, or the discipline, to write early and often. There are many things I do because I have to do them, but writing is something I do because I want to do it.

[Novilia]

Was I giving the impression that I didn't like to write, because if I did I apologize..... I love to write. I've been doing it since I was eight and before the I was playing games where I was a mother or an indian and creating my own worlds and stories with barbies. I do sit down, but the muse doesn't always come exactly when I want it to, which is something I should work on. Sometimes I really feel something and I have to write though. But I have never said, okay I need to write five pages today.

[SusanR]

By-the-by do you guys actually say to yourselves, "Okay, I have to work for three hours." That sounds kind of annoying. Am I the only one who just does it whenever the urge calls me?

It is annoying. And frankly, I almost always have to make myself start. And yes, I make myself write two pages of new material every day.

I'm with Dorothy Parker on this one, though. I hate writing. I love having written.

SusanR

[SeanDSchaffer]

Snipped....

I'm with Dorothy Parker on this one, though. I hate writing. I love having written.

SusanR


I love writing, frankly. It's the re-writing that I can't stand.

Maybe that's why my present WIP is coming along so slowly. I'm on my second re-write....

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/smilies/EmoteShrug.gif

[FolkloreFanatic]

I write on and off all day. SOmetimes I get pages and pages done. Sometimes I get nothing worthwhile done. I always write something.

I love writing, but I have to force myself to write in order for the pieces to flow together, and that's the hard part. Revision is a snape for me. If only I could just pour everything out without fear that I'd screwed everything up and then resolve to fix it tomorrow, I'd be a published novelist by now.

[Mike Coombes]

Between 6 and 10 hours a day.

yesterday as an example; Business plan revision, 4 hours. Risk assessment and safe system of work for fork trucks, 1 hour. Write mission statement, 1 hour. Rewrite production schedule method statement, 2 hours. Flow chart to suit, 1 hour. Then, when I get home, website copy revision, rewriting to include key words, 2 hours.

Or did you mean fiction. Yeah, I shoehorn that in sometimes.

Don't you guys have day-jobs?

[SusanR]

Don't you guys have day-jobs?

Sort of.

I'm a mostly-retired physician. I take emergency call for a nearby rural hospital, so one night a week and one or two weekends a month, I'm available by phone. I might have to go in on the weekend and see a patient or two. So I basically work from home nights and weekends.

When I first started writing my novel, I sat and worked for hours on end, and my end--rear end--suffered for it. I gained 13 pounds over the course of 250 pages. Now I write for two hours, then go to the gym. I'm almost done losing the weight I gained.

No butts about it, it's a lot of sitting.

SusanR

[jst5150]

Two to five (including writing I do as part of work, which may include feature writing).

[Avalon]

Don't you guys have day-jobs?

I do, I do! I work on that from 1 to 9ish.

[Jamesaritchie]

Don't you guys have day-jobs?

I haven't had a day job in so long I've almost forgotten what it's like. But, oddly, I write pretty much the same number of hours without a day job as I did when I had a day job. Five hours per day seems to be what I can write long term without burning out. It's just easier to fit those five hours in now.

[scribbler1382]

Only counting fiction writing, it's about 2 hours a day. I'm not back to writing everyday (yet!) but 2 hours has always been my magic number. I agree with Neal Stephenson when he says everyone has a sort of critical mass moment in a day's writing time. You know, that point where if you write any more, you're just going to wreck the stuff you just wrote.

I haven't slotted the same time each day yet for my writing, but typically it's around 9:30 or 10:00 until I'm done. Everyone's in bed by then and I can get into my story without fears of hearing "Dad? Mommy won't let me put my Tamagotchi in the blender!"

[The Scribbler]

I dont write everyday. I find that if I try and stick to some sort of schedule that the writing seems forced and is not that good where as if I wait until I get inspired then I can write for long periods of time, and the writing flows much better. There really is not any need for me to write everyday. I do spend some time each day working on things that I have already written but that varies as well.

[kathompson]

I generally put in 5 hours a day, but that includes days when I do pre-writing stuff, like outlines and research. Actual writing days, if I'm on a roll, I can work for 8-10 hours (with breaks in there...my butt gets numb if I sit here too long...)

No day job here. This is it. I write, or sit here pretending to write. It helps to have a well employed spouse :)

[My-Immortal]

Don't you guys have day-jobs?

Yep - but the thread question was 'how many hours a day do you write?' :)

My 'day job' Mon-Fri usually runs from 6am to about 6pm - and I try to write during 'nap time' (which varies from 1-2 1/2 hours). I sometimes write after dinner (which I make) from about 7 to 830pm or if I'm doing 'family time' then, I will wait until everyone else is asleep and write from 10pm until 12, 1 or 2am. I usually can't write much later than 2am unless my wife is off the next day because trying to keep up with a two year old on just 4 hours or less of sleep is not easy! (as I'm sure many of you already know. LOL) So, in total for a day - I write usually 2 to 5 hours.

I think if writing is important to you, you can always MAKE the time to write.

Take care all - and good luck with your writing endeavors. :)

[emeraldcite]

I write one hour, about a thousand words, every other day.

[aghast]

I try to write two hours a day but results may vary,.

[zeprosnepsid]

I'm unbelievably busy lately so I'm lucky if I get in 20 mins a day. The weekends I get in a couple hours a day but it's usually taken with my columns. It's very rare for me to get to write something I'm not being immediately paid for, although those are things I'd like to be working on...

[Sharon Mock]

Three to four hours a day, six days a week, more or less. No, I don't have a day job.

I do try to write six days a week. Way back in the prehistoric (college and post-college) days, I wrote "when the mood hit" -- generally every 2-3 days when I was working on the novel. The prose quality of the rough drafts may have been slightly higher, correcting for skill level, but when I hit a block it was devastating. The last one lasted me about ten years. Though I can't be certain, I believe if I had had more discipline back in my apprenticeship days, I'd have returned to writing much more quickly and easily.

Every writer is different, your mileage may vary, etc. But I would strongly recommend you try writing every day (*) before you dismiss it; and if you do decide it's not for you, come back to it every so often to see if it's started working for you again.

* where "every day" = five or more days a week. A 7 day/week work schedule doesn't work for me. I learned this the hard way. There is such a thing as being too absorbed in your writing.

[DivaNicoletta]

I write on and off all day. SOmetimes I get pages and pages done. Sometimes I get nothing worthwhile done. I always write something.

I love writing, but I have to force myself to write in order for the pieces to flow together, and that's the hard part. Revision is a snape for me. If only I could just pour everything out without fear that I'd screwed everything up and then resolve to fix it tomorrow, I'd be a published novelist by now.

I use the same style as you, sometimes I write pages, sometimes just a few.

[Kiva Wolfe]

If I am not on my computer, I am invariably writing in my head, even when I am at work. It makes the quintessential poster child for reclusive writers everywhere and me mysterious at most social events.

[Sage]

If I am not on my computer, I am invariably writing in my head, even when I am at work. It makes the quintessential poster child for reclusive writers everywhere and me mysterious at most social events.

Amen.

[cwfgal]

I honestly have no idea how many hours a day I spend writing. I had no idea even when I was making my living solely from writing. I have no set hours, no set length of time to write, and I don't write every day. I write whenever I can for as long as I can, or whenever I want to, or whenever I need to.

During the years I was writing for a living, there were weeks where I only worked 2 or 3 days, and weeks where I worked 7. Sometimes I wrote during the day, but more often I wrote at night -- I've always been a night owl and the daytime hours were often spent on business matters since that's when most "normal" people are available. I've never been very rigid with my writing time, and I've never had problems with deadlines. I think I tend to schedule in my subconscience so that things get done when they need to be done.

The only time I had an issue with procrastination was when I was growing weary of all the nonfiction writing I had to do to keep making a living at writing. I eventually realized I hated the nonfiction stuff. It felt too much like work and it was robbing me of the "pleasure" of writing. So I gave it up in exchange for a "day" job (though I work those night owl hours) and haven't regretted it (I really enjoy my non-writing job and missed it when I wasn't doing it--AND it's great fodder for ideas!). Now I write only fiction 99% of the time, though I still take on the occasional freelance assignment if it's something that really interests me. And my writing time, whenever and wherever it occurs, is always a pleasure.

Beth

[cleoauthor]

Two at the computer, but I think you also have to count the time you ponder and imagine and agonize. That seems to be a never-ending process, and it is the part I enjoy the most.

[stormie]

At the computer--I aim for five hours a day. That's not including posting on writer's boards.

[JA Konrath]

If I'm working on a novel, 8 hours. But I only work on novels a month out of the year.

If it's a short story (I do about one a month), I usually finish in a day or two.