The Sandy Method

The other day as I was wiling away the hours at my day job, I read an article with Alexander McCall-Smith who as we all know has written a gazillion novels and they were asking him about his writing methods and he says that he writes a 1,000 words per hour. Which, when you think about it, is not really a lot is it? Write the same word a 1,000 times over. It's not as much as you thought.

This got me thinking as I started to cower at looking over my list and contemplating how to not sleep for a year that the average full-length play is roughly 15,000 words. If you apply what I am now calling the Sandy Method, technically you could write a full-length play in 15 hours. Technically. Writing is of course a lot more than putting words on the page, even though in the end, it is putting words onto the page and deep down we all know this. But if you take out all the planning and outlining and whatnot which takes forever and that's just the way it goes, the actual writing should take no more than 15 hours. 20 if I'm being generous with myself.

With this thought in my head, I'm going to give it a try this weekend with my full-length play New Light Shine which has been outlined, thought about, thought about a bit more and agonised over. I'm going to see if I can put it all together over the weekend which technically has 48 hours but you know, a girl does have to sleep.

BTW, this post is just under 300 words and took me about 5 minutes.

I'm just saying.