: Re: How many hours a day will it take to complete NaNoWriMo? Or more helpfully, how do I gauge for myself in a realistic setting, how many hours an evening it will take to write 1,666 words

@Karen856

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You know how many words per day you need to average. The main question is how quickly can you write. I tried to estimate my writing pace by timing myself writing short stories and dividing the word count by the time taken. This gave me a pace which I plugged into a spreadsheet. I then kept daily records of how many words I'd written that day to see how my actual pace was compared to my minimum required pace.

However, what I discovered was that my estimated pace was really a best-case scenario, because short stories come easily to me while novels don't. Thus it was very hard to maintain my pace and the length of time I needed was approximately double. Given that and the fact that you can't miss a day if you're only doing the daily minimum meant that I fell off pace fairly early on in the process.

Thus my advice to you would be to write something fairly long (spend 30 minutes writing at least), then see how many words you got. Halve that speed as your estimated effective pace and allocate that much time per day. Then, keep track of your daily and average pace (time spent writing today, words written today) and update your estimates for how many hours remain. Schedule in long blocks of writing if you can, and try to get ahead early on so that you have some slack later.

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