Ask any writer, whether self-published or not how many words a day they say writers should be producing and you’ll hear them say “A thousand words every day!” and everyone one them can come up with a plan as to how to achieve that goal, or so they say.
They all look good (the plans that is) until you try them, and then it becomes hard work, slowly we ‘writers of lesser mettle’ start to grind down until eventually we just give up and think “I can never achieve that” and give up writing simply because we feel we can’t compete with the ‘big boys’ and girls who’re churning out those thousand words a day, but you know something, I’ve realised that goal is total baloney!
I wrote this book at a pace of about two hundred words a day, it took me three months, and I dare you to try and put it down when you start reading it!
There’s the link to the book.
I realised that with my job< I work sixty plus hours a week in my ‘day job’ and there’s just no way I can produce a thousand words a day, but does that mean I can’t produce a good story? I think not, does it mean I should stop writing and give up?
I’ll be honest with that one, there’s more chance of hell freezing over!
There have been days when I haven’t written much, and there are days when I can’t stop writing, but on average I probably produce two to three hundred words max.
That equates to a decent sized novel (around 70,000 words) every year! but there is a trick to it, and it’s a simple one, once you’ve taken the time to write the phrase stop and think about what might come next, is it possible? does that pub actually belong there, what about what your main character is doing, is it really the way they’d react?
Do those things, and it won’t matter how much or how little you write, because what you write will be so much better quality than ‘just hitting the target’
Here’s a thing to think of
Lord of the Rings is what 500,000 words?
Tolkien took 18 years to write it, that’s 6,570 days
Divide the 500,000 words by 6,570 days and it tells us he wrote roughly 70 words a day on the story! (that’s a lot less than a thousand words!)
This one was entered into awards, and less than 200 words a day
Take a look at both books, by the way,” I just did ‘the numbers’ and LOTR was less than I said, that means he wrote fewer words each day!
That makes me feel really good with my writing!
What about you?
Lawrence's letters 