23. How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story—from planning to writing to posting (if you post your work)?
As others have said before me, it depends.
Planning can be as little as ten minutes to a year or longer. If I’m writing an improv or a comment fic or something like that, I may just start with the first sentence that comes to mind and keep writing until it feels like the end, so actual “planning” doesn’t really … happen. If I’m writing something big and involved, it can take weeks or months before I write the first word, and I’ll still plot and research while I’m writing the rough draft.
Then as for the writing itself, it can be anywhere from an hour or so (a game I play with myself sometimes: I put iTunes on Shuffle and give myself an hour to write a story inspired by the first song that comes up, and those can be anywhere from 100 to 1000 words) to a few months for a novel. (Or going on two years for the movie. *cough*) I know I can write a 20,000-word novella in a month, or a 5000 word short in a week, or the occasional 50,000-word novel in the odd November; and then editing happens afterward. The speed at which that happens depends on how long until the deadline or how impatient I am to get the story posted in the case of fanfic.
Originally published at Jenna Jones.com. You can comment here or there.