by Kathleen Murphy

Created on: November 15, 2010   Last Updated: November 16, 2010

The time it makes me to write an article depends largely on what I'm writing about.  The part of writing that takes me the biggest chunk of time is research. So the most research-intensive articles take the longest to write, anywhere from a couple of hours to half a day.

Sometimes I write about a piece of literature, for example a Victorian novel or a Shakespeare play.  Then I need to have a lot of quotes from the work to validate my views and to give readers the flavor of the work.  Even if I know the novel or play fairly well, it takes a certain amount of time to go through it and find just the quotes I'm looking for.  Then, sure enough, I'll run into quotes I hadn't thought of, but are really great, and I'll have to do a little rewriting so I can throw them in there, too.

Then sometimes I'll be walking in the woods and take a picture of something really interesting.  I'll want to write an article and post the picture with it.  One day I got a great picture of four turkey vultures perched on a bench.  Now I didn't know anything about turkey vultures, but I wrote an article about them to go with the picture, which was fun to do, but the research took up most of the afternoon.

I like to write about ghosts and have a theme, such as Ghosts of Indiana.  But it takes a while to dig up Indiana ghost stories from various sources, and then organize them so the whole article flows nicely.  Biographies can also be time-consuming research projects.  The best thing to have in biographical articles is primary sources.  Quotes and first-person accounts can be pure gold as far as drawing and keeping readers' interest.  But it often takes some digging around to find them.

You've probably guessed that I don't write for a living, because to do that I'd have to crank out work a lot faster than I do now.

Even so, I often do a quick project, like write up a recipe or knitting pattern, just to get something accomplished.  I think all writers have their subject areas where they're very comfortable and can zip an article out in fifteen minutes or so.  That's not a bad thing for writers or readers, either, because sometimes readers want to read something quick and simple, too.

It comes down to the writer's classic dilemma of quality versus quantity, and, of course, it's too bad we can't always have both.

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