How long does it take you?

It takes me about a week of effort to write a 3000 word story, working maybe an hour or more each day. I don't always have the energy or motivation to do that, which is why I don't post new stories very often. I have three or four in the middle of being written, but who knows when they might get done.

You may be in some sort of writing limbo for the time being, just remember it happens to anyone, but I'm sure it's not the end of your writing skills, dear Ollie! Not for someone who wrote that magnificent "Never Too Old" which is still uppermost in my mind as the best and the most moving story I've ever read, here or elsewhere! I'm probably repeating myself, but I don't care!
So be patient, you will one day be able to write more prose!

It depends on a lot of things, but the actual writing part can go pretty fast when the muse is on my shoulder. Otherwise, things slow down. But I always put the story aside for a time to give things a chance to percolate. Then I go back and look at it with fresh eyes. Errors usually become manifest then and I can correct some things that in the heat of the moment, were missed. On balance, a story like the recent Acme Paddle at School takes a couple of weeks.

That said, I have fragments, including a novel, that can sit around for months.

Usually an hour or two.

Anything from a week to a year.
If the muse is with me as it was in a couple of my serials they virtually wrote themselves.
Unfortunately at the moment the ideas come but the stories don't.

I've had full-blown poems pop into my head when walking or sleeping, but stories are another matter entirely. It sometimes takes me days, even weeks, of sporadic writing to finish a 3,000 word story. I have found that the faster they go, the better they are, as a rule. But then there's the editing, and I do an inordinate amount of that.

I have never tried recording how long it takes me to write a story but I am guessing that it takes me about 10-15 hours to write a 2,000-2500 word story. I tend to edit as I go along. As I am writing, I will frequently pass over the story to add another detail or two. I will often plan out a scene or two in my mind while I am doing something menial such as walking or lying down. That would boost the total time to about 30 hours.

I start my stories from the end. When I dream a nice finish, the rest of the story usually comes along rather quickly. It's when I try to write the story from the beginning, or from a middle-story snippet it can take forever.

It varies wildly for me. I still have unfinished stories first started in 1998. But of course I haven't been working on those for a long time, mostly. When a story or a long verse gets a hold of me, i may work on it for several hours, straight, or for up to 12 or 14 hours over the course of several days, as time allows. This may finish the work. or (more likely) at least a first draft. If not, it may well be put aside, or at least go into a less intense mode. When the work comes to a conclusion, i will usually do several revision passes, but these mostly are at the word choice level, improving or at least changing sentence structure, grammar, diction. For verse this may mean tweaking meter and scansion, improving rhyme, and the like. (for SSC stories it used to involved cutting to fit the word limit, often) Sometimes I will expand a descriptive passage. More rarely I will add a scene in the middle. I almost never rearrange scenes or delete whole scenes. Sometimes, but not very often, i will decide to extend the work beyond what had seemed its initial ending. Editing passes usually are no more than an hour or two at a time, but there may be several of them for a given work.

However if a work is put aside unfinished there is no telling how long it may sit like that before it captures renewed writing energy.

The above applies mostly to solo work. When i am working with a co-author, the pace will often be driven by my coauthor's needs and desires, and by her available time, or partly driven by them. Sometimes in such a case the initial skeleton may have been generated via interactive chat. In that case more scene-level editing might be done, shifting things around, deleting parts that didn't work. The sentence-level work will mostly come after that, although not always.

Anyway, a 3000 word story may include 4-15 hours of drafting, and maybe 6-12 hours or revision work, but some will be a bit less, and some much more. I'm not counting time spent rereading my own work without editing it, waiting for the mood to do more writing to come.

But form what I have heard and read from both amateurs and professional writers, every writer is different in this. The mark of the professional is that s/he does some writing (or writing-connected work, such as outlining or marketing) almost every day, except for planned breaks or vacations.

If I know where I'm going 3-4 hours. But as gail said, revising takes longer and sometimes by the time I'm finished, an episode takes longer than that. But I like the sentences to be smooth and flowing, that takes longer. But it's OK If you like spanking,then it is not a punishment, its a pleasure.