A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin has said he's written 1,100 pages of next book The Winds of Winter, the same amount he'd written as of December 2022, while also revealing there are eight Game of Thrones spin-off shows being worked on.
You joke, but seriously that could happen. People that don’t think very deeply about it will just equate page count to a progress meter and for a decent amount of the process that probably isn’t untrue, but near the end its the least likely to be relevant. This is the point where the writer is having to thread everything together and is going back to refine things they’ve already done. That could actually mean culling lines, pages, or even whole chapters for a variety of reasons.
I said else where but many creative people know that the last 10% of a project is often the most time consuming.
People that don’t think very deeply about it will just equate page count to a progress meter
Exactly!
I’ve seen a good number of comments over time where people said things to the effect of “he’s already written 1,000 pages and says he has 200 pages left to write; 1,000 pages took him 5 years, so the other 200 pages will take him one more year”. I’m making up the numbers but this is the kind of math people do.
But Martin edits and rewrites, and occasionally discards large already-written chunks, like a madman. If you’d plot his page count it wouldn’t be a steadily rising graph, sometimes steeper, sometimes less so, rather it would look like a stock chart going up and down.
“I deleted them after I was done writing them, just like last year, but I did write them.” - also George
You joke, but seriously that could happen. People that don’t think very deeply about it will just equate page count to a progress meter and for a decent amount of the process that probably isn’t untrue, but near the end its the least likely to be relevant. This is the point where the writer is having to thread everything together and is going back to refine things they’ve already done. That could actually mean culling lines, pages, or even whole chapters for a variety of reasons.
I said else where but many creative people know that the last 10% of a project is often the most time consuming.
Exactly!
I’ve seen a good number of comments over time where people said things to the effect of “he’s already written 1,000 pages and says he has 200 pages left to write; 1,000 pages took him 5 years, so the other 200 pages will take him one more year”. I’m making up the numbers but this is the kind of math people do.
But Martin edits and rewrites, and occasionally discards large already-written chunks, like a madman. If you’d plot his page count it wouldn’t be a steadily rising graph, sometimes steeper, sometimes less so, rather it would look like a stock chart going up and down.