Writing is the Smallest Part in Writing

The actual keystrokes—fingers hitting keys, words appearing on screen—represent maybe 5-10% of total effort in creating a book.

Consider a 200,000+ word novel like those Brandon Sanderson produces. Pure typing time at 20 words per minute: roughly 167 hours. That’s the easy part.

Where the Time Actually Goes

Research. Hours disappear pursuing tangential information that never makes it into the final work. You need to understand something deeply to write about it convincingly, even if only a fraction shows on the page.

Naming. Finding character and place names is a significant time sink. My advice: use placeholder names. “HERO1” and “CITY_NORTH” work fine during drafting. Find-and-replace handles it later. Don’t break flow searching for the perfect name.

Dead ends. Writing yourself into narrative corners wastes time. When you hit a wall, backtrack to an earlier point rather than trying to write forward through the problem. Those deleted words still cost you hours.

Editing. Consistently the longest investment. Multiple revision cycles. Reading aloud. Fixing inconsistencies. Tightening prose. Then doing it all again.

The Math

A 300,000-word novel at 20 words per minute: about 250 hours of pure typing. Call it four months of dedicated writing time.

Add research, naming, dead ends, and editing? You’re looking at 3.5 years.

This post—just over 1,000 words—took nearly two hours when including research and revision.

The writing is the smallest part. Everything around it takes the real time.