It’s finally December, and with National Novel Writing Month over, I thought it would be fun to put up some statistics about how the month went for me. Let’s look at those word counts!
Scenes per Day
Goal: 3.7 scenes per day
Average: 4.3 scenes per day
Least: 1 scene on 11/22 (0 on 11/19, when I took a break)
Most: 9 scenes on 11/20 and 11/26
Buffer Average: 8.8 scenes ahead
Least Buffer: 1.2 scenes ahead on 11/04
Most Buffer: 14.8 scenes ahead on 11/26
Words per Scene
Goal: 500 words per scene
Average: 907 words per scene
Least: 600 words
Most: 1,580 words
In addition to the text in the scenes themselves, there were 231 words of titling in the story.
Words per Day
Goal: 1,667 words per day
Average: 3,881 words per day
Least: 1,305 words on 11/22 (0 on 11/19, when I took a break)
Most: 8,357 words on 11/20
Past Years
Just for comparison’s sake, I’ve whipped up these charts to show how well I did my first two years doing NaNoWriMo.
Granger (NaNoWriMo 2009)
I had a lot of distractions in 2009, but ended up hitting 50,003 words, just over the finish line.
Goal: 1,667 words
Average: 1,724 words
Least: 245 words on 11/06 (0 on a couple of days)
Most: 6,003 words on 11/01
10,000 Butterflies (NaNoWriMo 2008)
My first year for NaNoWriMo, and I got 52,644 words out of head and into that text file.
Goal: 1,667 words
Average: 1,755 words
Least: 177 words on 11/19 (0 on a couple of days)
Most: 5,536 words on 11/29
Three Years of NaNoWriMo
And because I couldn’t resist, here’s all three years side by side.
NaNoWriMos Won: 3/3
Quickest Win: 12 days in 2010
Longest Win: 29 days in 2008, 2009
Eventually I’ll get around to posting a more qualitative postmortem for this year’s novel writing adventure.
/jon
Note: The program I used this year, FocusWriter, while awesome in many respects, had one little flaw; namely that it counted hyphenated words (guard-mouse) as two words. The algorithm that NaNoWriMo uses (wc -w on unix systems) does not. I didn’t realize this until the middle of the month, so all of my numbers are slightly inflated. For example:
Word count (wc -w): 100,227
Word count (FocusWriter): 100,916
So overall that’s 689 hyphenated “extra” words, which I think is statistically insignificant enough to ignore. Since I don’t have the “real” numbers for each day, there’s nothing really I can do about it now. Anyway, onwards!
Jon Thysell 