Page 47 - WritingMadlyV3

then tidy it up, and we’ll send it off to the editor.
Editors work wonders.”
If the average longhand writing speed is around
twenty-five words per minute, you should end up
with around two hundred and fifty words. The av-
erage typing speed comes in at around forty-five
words per minute, so if you type, you’ll have quite a
lot more. An average page in this book (excluding
chapter titles) is around one hundred and ninety
words and, although today I type my books, I’m no
faster than longhand speed.
That’s just over a page in ten minutes. That’s six
pages an hour—or almost two hundred pages in
thirty-three hours. Exactly the time it took me to
write the first draft of this book. Naturally, a lot of
words get chopped in the editing process.
It was amazing what came out of me in those
sessions. Under that pressure, I remembered all
sorts of odd things like ballet dancing and racing
cars and donkey rides. It’s amazing what your mind
and your imagination throw up when they’re in a
hectic state. And that’s the beauty of Writing Madly:
you need content that is both rational and emotional
to make it interesting and human.
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