HOW MANY WORDS A MINUTE?

Dunstan Times, Issue 3141, 30 October 1922, Page 8

HOW MANY WORDS A MINUTE?

By a Literary Man.) The feat accomplished by Mr Hayden Talbot, the American journalist, in writing a 67,000-word life of Michael Collins in a week, probably constitutes a world's record.

It is an astounding feat of composition, an amazing demonstration of! both mental and physical endurance. Dr. Johnson's achievement in producing "Basselas" in a. week to a bookseller's order palls beside it. "Basselas" runs to a little more than 20,000 words, but it is, of course, full of style. B. L. Stevenson thought himself overworked producing 1000 words a day. Jack London wrote 1000 to 2000 words every day of his writing career of fifteen years. He produced one 120,000-word book in collaboration with a. cinema serial writer in two months. Mark Twain would write some 4000 words daily for three or four days, and then retire to bed for a day or two to recover. D'Annunzio composes exceedingly rapidly. De Maupassant would finish a 3000word short story in four days and not erase a word, but over his longer works ho struggled painfully ; while his master, Flaubert, hailed thirteen .. pages of "Madame Bovary" in one day as his record. It was Balzac's boast that "A Woman of Thirty" was finished in a fortnight. This would be about 20 2 000 words a week. He was a prodigious worker, and thought nothing of working eighteen hours a day on end. A modern writer of boys' detective stories will frequently produce a 30,000-word story in one week to order, and a serial writer will go up 40,000. One manufacturer of detective stories who in twenty years had written some forty millions of words around one character shot himself in a New York hotel early this year. Mr Hutchinson wrote "If Winter Comes" in six months on a typewriter. He works, on Hugh Walpole's advice, some four hours a day, which probably means an output of some 1500 words a day. Phillips Oppenheim and H. C. Wells would laugh at this.. The former gentleman dictates some 4000 words daily. This was about Charles Garrice's daily output, and is a trifle more than Ethel M. Dell's.

One of the most leisurely of living tvriters is George Moore. No one knows how many words a day George Moore writes, because no one dare ask him. If you mentioned the word output he would probably remind you gently'that his name was Moore, not Ford.