What is Reddit's opinion of 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter?

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There are plenty of people here in the "publish once a day" club doing that, and I know some do a lot more. I definitely found committing to publishing once a day has increased the rate I'm able to comfortable write at and I also think it's made my writing better.

I bought this book a while back and thought it was pretty good, although I haven't gotten to the point where I can do this volume in an hour http://www.amazon.com/000-Words-Per-Hour-Smarter-ebook/dp/B00XIQKBT8

Asta m-a ajutat mult.

https://www.amazon.com/000-Words-Hour-Faster-Smarter-ebook/dp/B00XIQKBT8

I'm in lockdown too (Sydney) and while I don't have kids, I do have three adults who are here all. the. time. And who make a ton of noise.

My productivity hasn't been as great as I'd like, and for the most part, I've decided to just accept it. But I have developed a couple of tricks that help:

- Noise cancelling earbuds are the best for blocking out their loud conversations, the TV, etc (I usually listen to nature sounds so I'm not distracted by song lyrics)

- I've started doing a quick typing test before I write to get my fingers warmed up, so I can smash out as many words as possible before someone interrupts me again: https://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english

- The pomodoro technique is also great for smashing out as many words as possible in a short time. Check out Chris Fox's "5000 words per hour" for tips on how to increase your speed.

- Detailed outlining makes it easier to come back to your story if you get interrupted (especially if you're like me and forget everything you've done when you come back to it). I miss being able to smash out an entire story in one afternoon :(.

> Thanks a bunch for the reply! You really seem to know your stuff :) I appreciate it.

You're welcome!

>I've started writing today and have gotten about 500 words done which I hope is okay for a beginner

It's excellent! Even full-time professional writers might only get 1,000 words a day, so you're doing fine. If you're really motivated to write more and you're the type of person that works well with an organized approach to things you can head over to Amazon and look for books like 5,000 Words Per Hour but, honestly, most people can't keep up a pace like that and it requires a lot of forethought about what you'll be writing and scheduling specific time for doing it, etc.

A good way to approach writing is to set a word count goal rather than a time period goal. In other words, set a goal for 1,000 words a day (or whatever you're comfortable with) rather than saying, "I'm going to write for one hour today." The word count goal can be accomplished over the entire day, whenever you have a few minutes to write. If you get stuck or have to take a break for some reason, that's fine because you can come back to it later on. With a time goal, it's often discouraging if you can't get your full hour in that day or you miss your scheduled hour which makes it very easy to put off the writing until the next day, then the next, then the next, and before you know it you're not writing anything anymore.

Personally, I like to set a goal of 1,000 words per day. I know that this takes me, usually, about an hour or so in total. I then try to write in 20-minute blocks with a break in between. The break is as long as it needs to be for whatever I'm doing during the break so if it takes five minutes and I'm ready to write again, I will. If the break is an hour, that's fine as well. The goal is just 1,000 words and it doesn't matter how I divide my time up to get those 1,000 words. If I happen to be on a roll when I hit 1,000 words then that's great. I'll keep writing until I get stuck or tired or have something else to do but I try to get a minimum of 1,000 words per day.

>I started doing the writing and it seemed to just flow until I got to the end of the 500 words and then noticed it started to drag along and started to get boring I think.

This is very common. A lot of writers start stories and get a few hundred words in, maybe up to 10k or so if they're lucky, and then things kind of peter out and they don't know where to go with it.

One way to overcome this is to ensure that your character has goals that they want to achieve. More specifically, you can give your character three goals. A public, personal, and private goal. The public goal is something big that affects a lot of people. The personal goal affects a small group of people, usually just the protagonist and other major characters in the story. The private goal is something that only matters to the protagonist and is often related to some sort of personal flaw that they have, which they may or may not be aware of. Having three goals, which should ideally be related in some way, gives you lots of material to work with.

Here's an example. Let's do a standard serial killer thriller. In fact, let's do The Silence of the Lambs:

• Public Goal: This is the big one. Usually, it's the plot of the story. The blurb on the back cover will usually state exactly what this goal is. So, in this case, it's "Work with Hannibal Lecter to take down Buffalo Bill before he kills his next victim." Note that the hook is often in this goal as well which, in this case, is "work with one serial killer to capture another serial killer" which was a unique hook at the time.

• Personal Goal: Starling has a very specific goal at the beginning of the story. She wants to complete her FBI training but, more importantly, she wants to be taken seriously as an FBI agent.

• Private Goal: Starling wants to "silence the lambs" which is, in this case, part of her backstory and is sort of a dramatic way to show the reader that she feels inadequate, helpless, out of her depth, etc.

Note that all three of Starling's goals tie into one another. If she can capture Buffalo Bill then she will prove herself as a skilled FBI agent to her colleagues and prove to herself that she has what it takes to do the job and that she's no longer the scared little girl she was from her backstory.

One bit of advice for this is that if you're doing a series character, you may not want to neatly resolve the Private goal. That character flaw can be the thing that's worked on in each novel, but never really resolved fully thus the need to keep writing new stories and showing the character dealing with that goal in different ways. You can also have several such Private goals for your protagonist, none of which are ever truly resolved, which you rotate through so that in one novel the protagonist is dealing with Private Goal A, in the next novel it's Private Goal B, then Private Goal C in the third novel, then back to Private Goal A for the next novel and so on. The character constantly makes some progress (i.e., has a character arc) but never manages to completely fix their issue, unless you or your readers are tired of it. Then you can resolve it and bring in some new issue that becomes a new Private Goal.

> I'm aiming for a 50,000 word novel to start off with.

That seems like a good place to start. Note that if you're going for traditional publishing, most will want at least 80k words minimum. If you're self-publishing, it doesn't matter. Readers generally don't care about the length, just the entertainment value. Traditional publishers need larger word counts to justify a physical print run of the book and, ultimately, it's just cheaper for them to print a bunch of 300 page novels than it is to print a bunch of 175 page novels.

>By the way, do you think that it's wise to let people read pages of the novel before the entire thing is done?

It's really up to you. Some writers are really insecure about letting people see unfinished work. Others love the feedback since it can be hard to judge your own work and know if something is good or not.

Just remember that feedback should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Don't change something just because one or two people hated it. Alternatively, don't keep something you're not happy with because one or two people loved it. Now, if you give it to 10 people and they all hate something, or you're constantly getting the same kind of feedback at the same place in the story, you'll probably want to consider reworking it or removing it.

Consider beta readers as a sort of gauge of how entertaining the story is rather than as a way to tell if your actual writing itself is "good" or not. Everyone knows a good story when they see one, even if the writing style isn't their favorite. Listen for things like, "I really liked when X happened," or "I was confused about Y," and things of that nature. Ignore advice like, "You should really write this scene so that [some specific thing happens in some specific way]." That can be fine if you're actually looking for ideas, but it's not helpful if you like your own ideas and just want to know if the story itself is entertaining.

>I'm working on a chapter by chapter basis so it's like I'd love for someone to read a chapter first and get feedback on it.

Check this sub's FAQ and scroll down to the Critiques and Workshops section for some subs you can post to.

Just be really careful with asking for advice from writers. You'll get lots of feedback, but much of it will probably be contradictory and will come from their own personal point of view on how you should write. This can be helpful when you're first starting since you can pick up new techniques, but you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I mentioned before, if something resonates with you and you feel like it fits your style then use it. If not, ignore it and do your own thing.

If you want some feedback from readers rather than writers, head over to /r/WritingPrompts or, since you like horror, /r/nosleep. Post a few short stories there (read the FAQ in /r/nosleep since they have some specific requirements for stories) and see what people say about them. Most people will either not reply, if the story doesn't do anything for them, or you'll get a rather lukewarm response (i.e., "Nice story!") which doesn't really help. If you get a really good response, where people are actually interacting with you and letting you know what they liked (or didn't like), then that's helpful since it's basically the general reading public who is responding to you.

>Thanks again for the reply!

You're welcome again!