I know many people can’t wrap their head around writing a novel. A year ago I was one of them. So many words. But let’s look at it another way.
Warning: Statistical geek out follows.
I follow a bunch of people on Twitter. Some are prolific, and some are not. I certainly am not. Today, I was wondering how many words are written on Twitter, so I did a little math. It’s actually quite startling.
According to the Wikipedia entry for “words per minute (wpm)“, for the “purposes of measurement a word is standardized to five characters or keystrokes”. So a tweet, which is limited to 140 characters, equates to 28 words.
Let’s assume all tweets are 140 characters, or 28 words. So for a novel comprised of 50,000 words, that equates to just under 1,786 tweets. If you’ve written 3,000 tweets, that’s the same as writing an 84,000 word thriller. I realize that tweets are made up of so much more, like pictures, URLs and hashtags, and those items would skew the results. However, my point is anyone can write a novel if it is broken down into smaller pieces.
A full 140 character tweet is rare. The average length of a tweet is about 67 characters. Let’s round up to 70, which equates to 14 words or exactly half of a full tweet. Using that data, 3,572 tweets equals about 50,000 words.
As of writing this, I have 1,022 tweets to my name. I try and maximize the content in my tweets, so that represents approximately 28,500 words. And that total just happened, tweet by tweet, day by day. It took little effort.
So when I write a novel, I try and think of it as one sentence, one paragraph at a time. It all adds up.
Photo by Maryland GovPics
