I recently mentioned, regarding Charles Dickens, that I'd like to know the ratio of published words to days of adult life lived. Being not fully adjusted to the modern world, I sometimes forget that you don't have to wonder about these things. According to normblog, by way of the Twitter account @DickensDaily, Dickens's fifteen novels (including Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished at his death) have a total of 3,859,231 words. Since this leaves out A Christmas Carol and Sketches by Boz, let's put the word count at the nice round figure of 4 million. Dickens died at age 57, so, keeping numbers round, let's say his career as an author of fiction lasted 35 years. I'm just trying to get an idea here.
Thirty-five years times 365 days per year makes 12,775 days. Four million words divided by 12,775 days makes 313 words per day. I'm surprised it's that low! About a page a day, every day, for 35 years. Of course, the work of composing a novel involves more than just producing words—there is the architecture of the thing to work out, assuming you don't just write down the first sentence and then "feel your way forward" for a few hundred pages. And writing novels isn't all Dickens did. He had ten children. He went to the theatre. He toured the world, including America twice, giving lectures and setting down his reactions in documents that don't count toward the 4 million word count. Ditto for the journalism he churned out as a very young man. Still, the calculations suggest that the cumulative effect of steady application may exceed expectations.
Let's see, if I watch sports on TV, an average of an hour per day every day for fifty years. . . .
Comments