{"id":8208,"date":"2011-06-20T14:59:19","date_gmt":"2011-06-20T18:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=8208"},"modified":"2011-06-20T14:59:19","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T18:59:19","slug":"the-writers-word-time-equivalency-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/the-writers-word-time-equivalency-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writers’ Word-Time Equivalency Scale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>L<\/span>et’s suppose you are a writer, and value your time spent writing, and measure your success in a given writing session in terms of words written. So far so good. This describes about ninety percent of the writers I know.<\/p>\n

Let’s take it to another level. Suppose you are behind — or perceive yourself to be so — in recently attained word count. So you take a day off from your paying job to catch up. You get out of bed, heat up the teakettle, walk The Pooch, see your loving spouse out the door to his or her own day job. You pour the first cup of tea or coffee. You sit down at the computer keyboard. You inhale. You crack your knuckles…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Y<\/span>ou suddenly get a whiff of your own armpits. Good God<\/em> <\/em>, you think. I haven’t showered in forty-eight hours<\/em>. You consider that if this were a real<\/em> work day, you’d be fresh by now. And productive. Maybe cleanliness provokes productivity?<\/p>\n

Best not to take a chance. You get ready to take a shower— But, oh, heck, you might as well press off a shirt so you’ll have something to change into before you return to the keyboard newly clean and scented.<\/p>\n

So you go to the closet… Well for chrissake<\/em>. The hamper o’erflows. How the hell long has it been since you did laundry, anyway? Sure, you can just throw on a ratty old T-shirt today, but tomorrow, tomorrow<\/em> you’ll need something for work, and do you really want to put off washing your stuff until tonight when you can get so much more of it done while you’re home today? So you sort the laundry, coming up with four roughly equal-sized piles, and you load the first one into the washing machine. Virtuous, you return to the kitchen to freshen your coffee or tea before getting back to the writing.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>here’s a banana on the counter. Oh, right. You got that to have with cereal on your day off, didn’t you? Just as well. You need a healthy breakfast. You need to keep your stamina up for the coming marathon of verbosity.<\/p>\n

You prepare breakfast. OJ. Hot beverage. Cereal, with sliced banana and 2% milk. No way can you get all that to the desk in one trip, but maybe you don’t need to because after all you’re already in the kitchen<\/em>, and there’s the kitchen counter with the empty space right next to the morning newspaper. You eat, and you read.<\/p>\n

You dismount from the kitchen barstool, heap the dirty dishes in the sink — you don’t have time today to wash the damn dishes!<\/em><\/p>\n

F<\/span>rom the laundry room, sudden silence: final spin cycle complete. You go down the hall, switch the stuff from the washing machine to the dryer, go to the bedroom, get the next load of laundry, put it in the washing machine, turn everything on, and turn to make your way back to the desk.<\/p>\n

You pass through the living room en route<\/em>. The Pooch, who has been sleeping soundly all morning, takes the opportunity to scamper across the floor to you, prostrating herself on the carpet at your feet, stretching out, yaaaaawning, exposing as much flesh as possible for the attention of human fingertips, writhing ecstatically in satisfaction at having now checked off four things from her own daily to-do list: walk, poop, sleep, be adored. She suddenly remembers there was a fifth item… oh, yes, breakfast!<\/em> Pooch runs to kitchen floor, to the plate which you left there for her a couple hours ago now. She looks down at it, up at you. Down at it, up at you. Down, up. Down…<\/p>\n

So you pick up the food from the floor, toss it in the trash, replace it with fresh. The Pooch looks down at it, then up at you. She spins. Looks down, up. Barks. Forget it<\/em>, you say, and turn your back on her now crushed-by-disillusion self. You return to your home office. Crack your knuckles. Exhale…<\/p>\n

About a half-hour and a hundred words later, a sudden loud unmistakable buzzing announces the end of the dryer’s first cycle. You go to check on it. Add ten minutes to the timer…<\/p>\n

S<\/span>omebody really needs to develop and publish a sliding scale for writers. Doing one load of laundry should count for, oh, say, two hundred words. Preparing and eating a healthy breakfast: another two hundred words. Treating a treasured family pet with even fleeting respect: one hundred words. (A mid-day walk, including poopage: another hundred.) And so on.<\/p>\n

And then somebody needs to alert agents and editors to the New Way, so they can update their submission rules: No more than eighty thousand words, please, or the equivalent in washing, drying, showering, and walkies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

…Crap. I’m so<\/em> ready to take a nap now. But the first load of laundry’s done, and it’s all shirts so they’ve all got to come out of the dryer and be put on hangers, and the second load needs to go into the dryer, and the third load into the washing machine. And I should eat lunch…!<\/p>\n

And then I’ve got to continue with my writing day…<\/p>\n

…well, maybe just a half-hour of shut-eye…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s suppose you are a writer, and value your time spent writing, and measure your success in a given writing session in terms of words written. So far so good. This describes about ninety percent of the writers I know. Let’s take it to another level. Suppose you are behind — or perceive yourself to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,405,5,713],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-nature","8":"category-06_writing","9":"category-humor-writing_cat","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-28o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}