how long is 175 pages... really

175 pages of what?
Book pages, MS word pages...? Font size, margin size, all need to be taken into consideration too, which is why most people talk in terms of word count rather than page count.

Last years NaNo ended up being 134,000 words, or 217 pages in MSword-- 1 inch margins, Courier New font, single spacing. I think I had an average of 650 words a page. I'd say altogether, that was about three weeks of writing for me, since I took some time after NaNo to finish it up. During NaNo, I was writing 10-15K a day for the first two weeks, so I guess that gave me an average of 20-25 pages a day. I'm a fast writer, when an idea comes to me, I generally dont have too much trouble getting it out onto paper.

Nano 05: Without A Past- ! 52K
Nano 06: So Much More Than Gold and Finding Alaska- ! 115K!
Nano 07: Made To Be Broken and Jersey Heart - 93K!

i may be crazy
but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for

I seem to recall that back when I wrote on a typewriter, double spaced, I used to run about 250 words per page. That would put 175 pages at 43,750 words.

Do a page, and then count how many words you have. multiply it by 175. If you're using Word or some similar program, it will give you the word count.

I don't usually go by pages, because I'd have to print it out -- and don't get to that stage till the very final edits. I go by word count on RoughDraft and usually go a little over 50,000 words before uploading it to the word counter just to be sure there are no minute differences in counting method that would go against me.

It doesn't take me very long at all, not if I spend every day working on it solidly. Admittedly the biggest reason I get "Monster of Wordcount" counts is just spending a long time per day writing without stopping. My best year, 2004, I got 160,000 words in two 80,000 word novels. I also spent six to ten hours a day writing to get that, and I type well over 100 words a minute now that I use the Dvorak layout. I was stuck at 81 on QWERTY layout and then got back up to speed in a year or two of Dvorak, now I am typing MUCH faster. Reason: the keys are closer to my stronger fingers, the most used ones on home row and first finger, the easy to reach ones. Do not change to Dvorak in November. The best time to try learning Dvorak is December, to give most of the year to get used to it and at least be up to speed by Wrimo.

Before Nanowrimo, stop and freewrite. Put a timer on yourself. Make up something. Just a story or the backstory notes, some topic to do with your novel. Write continuously for an hour. Stop and word count it. Do the same thing for freewrite babbling anything that comes out of your head as a second experiment. Try it again while working on a tough difficult scene that you want to get absolutely perfect. Compare all three results.

Your average speed making things up should be somewhere between the two extremes. Take your low number as how many hours to block during November to make your goal. Then try to write fast, closest to the babbling freewrite speed, because once the novel gets going it's easy to just rush and get it all down fast without looking down. If it's not, then try to achieve that state of mind -- slow and careful writing is not what this is about. You can fix the typos, you can edit everything that you got wrong in that rushing first draft -- but you will make the count if you write without stopping for enough hours to do it.

I timed my longhand writing at 30 words a minute and if you can do better than that, your computer is giving you a good advantage. Most decent typists can. If not though -- then plan your day's writing around your real speed and not some ideal speed. That much typing is likely to improve your speed of creativity and speed of typing by the end of the event.

Patience and stubbornly doing it a lot will get you up to ludicrous speed someday -- but 1,667 words a day is not hard. I tend to guess pages at being 250 words so that would be four pages for 1000 words, or seven of those pages a day. But that is in double spaced manuscript format with Courier New twelve point type. Your mileage will vary depending on font and format. Thus plan for word count and use Word or RoughDraft to count it while you're writing, seeing it mount up can be very gratifying. :)

RoughDraft is free. Google it and download it, it's a light easy to use word processor designed for writers. I love it and it responds beautifully. It also has a Pad file attached to the RTF files that you can use for Cast List, Place Names and any other information you want to carry forward and not have to fish back through previous chapters to find. Lists work best for that rather than whole paragraphs, but I usually put in a one paragraph chapter synopsis as I finish the chapter too, so if I do need to look something up I can glance and find out what chapter they met the bard in, etc.

robertsloan2 at LiveJournal, SFFmuse, DeviantART and eHow. Still beside my faithful Siamese sidekick, Ari Cat >^..^<

Yep, that's been my rule of thumb for manuscript pages. A single spaced one is about 500. Trying to keep something on ONE page, like the novel's synopsis, has been tough sometimes!

robertsloan2 at LiveJournal, SFFmuse, DeviantART and eHow. Still beside my faithful Siamese sidekick, Ari Cat >^..^<

Oh, I haven't written all the rules yet, but you don't have to write on here? Where do you write on then??? How do you post it? How do you submit novel excerpts? Can you give me a place to read all this? It's all so exciting and confusing! Thank you so much =]]

Love 4evr + evr, Kaitlyn

You don't write your novel on the NaNoWriMo website. You write it on your own, in a word processor (or, heck, a notebook) of your choosing. I use plain old Microsoft Word, but if you hop over to the NaNo Technology forum, you can find people talking about writing their novels in all sorts of other word processors, some created specifically for novel writing.

But it doesn't matter what you write your novel in. All that matters is that you get it written. How many pages 50,000 words take up depends on a lot of things -- your font size and style, your margins, your spacing, etc.

Once you have a short piece of your novel you'd like to share with others who visit your profile, you can go to the "My NaNoWriMo" tab and post your excerpt. But no one on the forums or at the NaNo office will be reading your whole manuscript (unless you decide to do a swap with a friend come December).

--
NaNo '01 - '04 - occasional winners, occasional brilliance, but mostly unfinished tripe
NaNo '05 - Number Zero (50K)
NaNo '06 - The Babushka Lady (60K - draft 3 and almost finished!)

Don't worry about the page count. Write in whatever processing program you want--Word, Lotus, Office, or whatever people use... even notepad works, but it doesn't have a counter. Page count really depends on how much dialogue vs how much description vs margins vs font size and font face... ayep. It's all about WORD count, the page count is just an estimate... I end up with more, I think, because I tend to do a lot of dialogue, but I'd have to dig up my file to find out. Maybe I will....

It is not a limit on words. ;) It is a GOAL of words. I did 100k last year, actually. How fast do you type? The word count--well, my region had a guy who finished in... umm... 5 days, I think it was. I finished halfway through the month and kept going. Some people time it so they finish the last day--that's 1667 words a day.

...Okay, surprise! I have 176 pages for 69,000 words (I did two stories that year). Default margins and size 12 TNR. Font really makes a difference. If I was writing in Verdana or something, there'd be more pages. I write fast--around 100WPM, so I can do my day's wordcount in 15, 20 minutes easy.

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INT. THE NANOWRIMO FORUMS - NOVEMBER '07
ON THE EDGE 103,000/50,000 words. WON!
(2005: Through Silver Glass 50k, WON!
2006: The Legend of Scarecrow, 100k, WON!)