For a (self-imposed) challenge, I did write a 12k story in one day (in fact, in about 15 hours) once. Complete, from idea to first draft. It left me in a state of complete mental exhaustion and I don't think I wrote anything else for days afterwards.
And I still haven't got round to polishing it.
Normally, I would expect to take from 7 to 20 days to write a 10k story, from inception to final polish. Of course, it rather depends how much of the day one normally spends writing.
I think anything up to about 3k or a touch over is a "one-sitting" story - a story whose idea is small enough that your brain can hold all of it at once. More than that, and I think it becomes the sort of story you need to assemble from smaller components (this - plus the ideas of scene transition and pacing - is one of the reasons that most of my stories longer than that tend to be written in "mini-chapters", though in a novel I'm happy to write chapters that are 6k or more in length).
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Date: 2007-08-01 04:00 pm (UTC)And I still haven't got round to polishing it.
Normally, I would expect to take from 7 to 20 days to write a 10k story, from inception to final polish. Of course, it rather depends how much of the day one normally spends writing.
I think anything up to about 3k or a touch over is a "one-sitting" story - a story whose idea is small enough that your brain can hold all of it at once. More than that, and I think it becomes the sort of story you need to assemble from smaller components (this - plus the ideas of scene transition and pacing - is one of the reasons that most of my stories longer than that tend to be written in "mini-chapters", though in a novel I'm happy to write chapters that are 6k or more in length).