I enjoyed the book write better, faster, in which an author set out on a series of self-experimentations to write faster. First she tried measuring words per hour. She was quite successful at getting this to be much higher, but it turned out that this resulted in writing for less time each day (so average wordcount per day was about the same). She then tried to maximize words per day, which was again successful, but this similarly resulted in writing less on subsequent days. (She might have then had the same experience on the week level, I don’t remember.) And finally, she tried to write as much as possible in one month, but this resulted in burn-out which left her unable to write for several months.
And she sold the book promising to teach readers how to write faster anyway. She somewhat downplayed the extent to which all her experiments failed to increase her global average productivity. But, she included all her data at the end of the book.
Her conclusion (a conclusion which seems somewhat common amongst artists) was that there is a finite resource, “inspiration”, which is used up by writing. This resource is re-filled only by “life experience” or something.
I enjoyed the book write better, faster, in which an author set out on a series of self-experimentations to write faster. First she tried measuring words per hour. She was quite successful at getting this to be much higher, but it turned out that this resulted in writing for less time each day (so average wordcount per day was about the same). She then tried to maximize words per day, which was again successful, but this similarly resulted in writing less on subsequent days. (She might have then had the same experience on the week level, I don’t remember.) And finally, she tried to write as much as possible in one month, but this resulted in burn-out which left her unable to write for several months.
And she sold the book promising to teach readers how to write faster anyway. She somewhat downplayed the extent to which all her experiments failed to increase her global average productivity. But, she included all her data at the end of the book.
Her conclusion (a conclusion which seems somewhat common amongst artists) was that there is a finite resource, “inspiration”, which is used up by writing. This resource is re-filled only by “life experience” or something.