Edit: Have been convinced to give it a chance. Currently at start of book 3.

A real-life friend who's judgment in fanfiction I usually trust has recommended I read the Sacrifices Arc.

I am enormously reluctant to do so:
(1) Slash
(1b) HP/DM SLASH

(2) Apparently, Guardian!Snape

(3) Long (read: 3 MILLION FUCKING WORDS, or at my fastest, at least two weeks, considering college classes)

...and suddenly I realized that the author managed to pump out the entire thing between books 6 and 7. MANAGED TO WRITE A CHAPTER PER DAY. CHAPTERS THAT AVERAGE OUT TO ALMOST 6 THOUSAND WORDS EACH.

Suddenly, this issue became much more important than my statistics homework. DLP, please shed light on my ignorance.

How the fuck did the author write that much that fast?
Addendum: I can write about 1000 words of extremely unpolished material in an hour. My WPM is more like 50, but that's obviously not a realistic writing speed. But I can't keep up the former pace for very long, let alone 6 hours a day (and then going to back polish it up).

Also, convince me not to read it.gl

 

They probably wrote it all up beforehand and posted a chapter a day until the whole thing was uploaded.

Simple.

Also, don't read it because you don't want to.

Even more simple.

 

Sam the Storyteller is great. He has a Lupin/Tonks fic that's excellent as well.

 

They started writing 3 months after HBP was released, and if horcuxes are a part of the plot (according to the summary, at least), that seems even less likely.

I understand no-lifing, but you would literally not be able to hold a job or go to school with this schedule.

And yeah, not reading.
I just wanted an explanation for the writing pace, which I'm still unsure about.

 

Your point?

 

So some unemployed, likely 20-something woman sat at home writing fanfiction all day for over a year? The house which she no doubt paid for with her written depictions of gay buttsex.

I'm just trying to understand how this is possible in the real world, unless she was already retired... and doesn't really strike me as a grandma, but I guess you never know.

 

The half-finished novel I'm currently sitting on was written in two weeks, with 5k words produced each night after lectures. If you've planned hard enough, there's no reason you can't sit down and just bolt it out. Especially if it's shit.

 

...alright, my question has been answered: it is indeed possible. Just out of curiosity, how many words per hour do you generally write productively for fanfiction?

 

It all depends on my mood. But generally less than that. The most time consuming thing about writing fanfiction for me though is going back afterwards and tidying it all up. The actual writing flies on to the page. Obviously if you're writing god awful slash, you don't need to go back and edit.

EDIT: Also it's worth noting the more practice you get, the better you are at it. At first the five thousand words would take me until the wee hours of the morning and ruin my night's sleep. In the end, I managed to squeeze it into the hours of 5 and 12, including a break for food.

 

I can write 2-3k in an hour. The problem is that I usually just go back and delete what I've just written, though, and start again. So the 2k on the page disappears, is replaced, repeat, and then after four/five solid hours of writing I have 2k that I'm semi-happy with and go through it, adding and subtracting wherever and fixing it up, then do that three or four more times (VotN calls it 'self-BETAing'), then finally start on the next 2k. If I like what I've written, or aren't too bothered about making it decent, I can get quite a lot done in a night - equally, I get end up after hours of 'writing' with nothing more than a blank page and a headache. The first 27k of HPAC was written in three weeks - the next 21k took me three months.

Differs for each person and each story, but the words themselves don't usually take too long if you're going to worry about tidying them up at a later date. My arse-backwards method is what takes me so long.

From the state of Sacrifices, I can completely believe she posted as she wrote.

 

I can pump out 5000 words in an evening if I really set my mind to it, and if I've got everything planned in advance. My issue is getting motivated, and the fact that I'm a full-time student.

As for Sacrifices... eh, I wouldn't read it. It's a very, very angsty fic, and the atmosphere of the whole story is really suffocating and hard to read. It's character derailment at best, and very uncomfortable to read at worse, particularly as the author has a bad habit of attempting to tug heartstrings... and by the end of the seven stories, I really felt I had wasted my time. Nothing gained from the experience at all.

 

I put this down to performance enhancers ;D

 

I can deal with angst, but if it's suffocating I think I'll stay away. Too much of anything rather ruins a story.

 

I can write a 5-7k chapter in about 3 nights. My problem is that I'm so busy or I rarely have muse, that these three days can be spend apart to many weeks or months.

It takes me forever to sit down and write. I procrastinate for a long time and when I finally sit down, the words will just freeze. Once I get into a flow, I can write for hours without stopping. So, if people can just sit down and work, I bet they could write it easily.

There is another fic, Harry Potter and the Breeding Darkness (a slash fic) that was author posted updates with how many words she had written on the sequel. She ended up with more than 200,000 words in a month. She also worked and was a mom. Her story rambled way too much and way too long. It seems, for the people who can write 12471294876 words a night, tend to write everything and their fics just go on forever.

 

6,000 words a day is not uncommon for me if the flow is right, even if I'm working in between. Doesn't happen instantly, and I'm always working off a detailed outline with quotes and little beats to put in as I go, but when I get going, I get going. I had one day off from work and managed to slam out 12,000 words back for Breach of Contract, and while I rewrote parts of it later, I can safely say that at least 10,000 words of it wasn't shit. In fact, the whole first draft of that story was about 60,000 words and was written in about two weeks. A whole bunch of self-betaing and rewriting later, and the full story hit about 75,000 words.

So yeah, 6,000 words a day isn't exactly the rarest thing in the world to me.

 

The writer of HP and the Breeding Darkness is a stay-at-home mum and everything she puts up she has written long beforehand. She also doesn't edit very much at all, and that aspect of the fic is quiet noticeable.

As for me, I'm slow, I can get maybe 1k an hour and that's when I feel like when I'm on a roll. And I'm rarely happy with the finished product.

 

As much I hate the Sacrifices series, I feel I should note that the author does indeed have a life. She's an English Lit. teacher. I believe she used to write the story in class lol.

 

Personally I enjoyed the Sacrifices arc. Yes its long, but it is original and interesting throughout. The slash doesn't come into at all until the 5th one, and there is no 'gay buttsex' for the majority of the fic. The relationship actually plays a very minor role in the fic. If you're enough of an idiot to obsess over a small detail and ignore the larger picture in favour of it, then by all means don't read it. If you're a mature adult reader, then give it a try and see if you enjoy it.