Yes, but I think that's half the problem - it isn't in my head. I'm not a planner. I've tried sitting down with a pad and pen and planning a novel, but it didn't work. I'm impatient and must begin writing when I get the urge. Consequently, when I sit down to write a novel, I have little more than an idea - or even just a concept sometimes - on which to build. I'm making it up as I go along, right there on the page.
I've thought a lot about that. Photography should not be considered art, but rather a form of journalism. Music, painting, writing, sculpting,- you are always creating content as well as depicting that content. In photography, you are more or less just depicting.
I use to count my words for statistics, but I don't grade a writing day as "bad" because I only wrote a certain amount of words and not more. In the end writing is not about the number of words you dumb on a piece of paper (document whatever) each day, it's about WHAT you have written. And if I needed the whole day to write 500 words to finish my chapter I am absolutely content with myself if I am content with what I've produced in those 500 words. Note, that this is my personal opinion. Other writers, other habits. Some people need the pressure of reaching a daily word count to produce quality work, some are getting crazy if writing under pressure. (@OurJud, I think you may fall in the last category... And there is nothing bad about not planning a novel. There are two types of authors, those who are planning ahead und know what they want to write before they start and those who just start writing and look whereever it leads them.)
I'd say 2 words a day is probably on the lower end But as someone pointed out, 300 words a day for a year and you'll have a novel.
Another (somewhat scary to me) way to look at word-count, is to consider that 300 words amounts to roughly one side / page from a regular sized paperback novel. It's nothing, is it?
I can't write every day so I shoot for 2,000 words per week and usually do most of it in one or two binges. But 200-300 if you're doing a daily count sounds workable as a start.
Today I found it pretty hard to get motivated so I've only managed around 1000 words so far. As I say, it varies greatly and can entirely depend on how you're feeling. I aim to get at least 1000 words written each day and then that way I can have a good-sized novel done in 100 days (although I am hoping to manage around 3000 words most days).
If 200-300 is low, average or high depends a lot of who you ask so there's no right answer. For someone who write 4-5000 words a day (I have a friend who does that) it would be considered low, but for others it's pretty average. I think you should worry less about how much other people write and just write the best you can using the time you have at hand.
I KNOW! It's insane! I could never do that for an entire ms. Not for more than one day or two at least. Usually I write between 500-2000 words a day.
I think the most I've ever managed in a day was just under 15000 but I could never keep that up consistently. That was with endless hours of work, which I had to go back through and polish off the next day. Your numbers are a great place to be at, I'm also averaging around 2000 currently.
I think writing 2000 words a day for an extended period of time is already quite an accomplishment. I could never do that, neither physically or mentally, write 10K a day that is. Not even for a week or so that it would take to write a novel, because 1. my best writing comes within a certain range, usually 1000-1500 K, and after that I get tired. There's a limit for how much creativity I can produce in one day, and even if I pushed myself to write that amount it would probably need a complete rewrite afterwards 2. I tend to get problems with my neck and shoulders when writing more than 3000 words a day for more than a day or two. After having written a 34K manuscript for a novella in a week I had problems with my neck for over a year. It's clearly not worth it. Writing is not about churning out as many words a day as possible. We should probably worry more about quality than quantity... If 2000 words a day is enough for Stephen King, I think it's enough for most of us
My PB is something like 6000 in a day. I can't possibly write more than that! 15000 is incredible, even if it's only one day.
Bearing that in mind, you'd have a 100000-word novel finished in under two months! That would be awesome!
But that's not a book, it's a blog. And how were we meant to check it out from your first post, when you gave no links or indications as to where to find it? Wow! I could have written those two sentences myself. I sympathise.
With a picture of the book, on the page, in bright red, that you can click on that takes you directly to amazon. I usually google things of interest, or type them into the search bar of Amazon if it's specifically book related. Or simply ask the person mentioning it.
I'm currently aiming for 5000 words per week, just because I feel like its dragging on a bit now and I wanna get moving. I can easily do 1000 per evening sitting, but sitting every evening (or even 5 evenings per week) is the struggle.
How many words do you write per day, on average? Not necessarily all the time, but during the writing of any given story. Once you’ve started, how many words do you write per day and how does that compare to how many you plan to write? I’ve just calculated how many words per day I’ve written on my WIP novel. So far, I’ve written 9,121 words. Thing is, it’s actually taken me 31 days to write that! That’s an average of 294.2 words per day! In fairness to myself, my girlfriend did have a baby a few weeks ago, so I was at home for two weeks, where, if I wasn’t eating, changing nappies or feeding the baby, I was sleeping. Even then, if I subtract those 14 days from the 31, that still only leaves me with an average of 536.5 words per day! I had set out to complete the first draft of my novel by the end of the year. With 140 days left, at that rate I can still write another 75,110. Added to my current 9,121, that’d be 84,231. Not bad for a first novel. Having said all that, I’ve written 1,600 words today. The trick is writing that number consistently. Stephen King once stated that, at first, he used to force himself to write 1000 words per day. He then upped that to 2000. I could be somewhere there in the middle. Still, I’m sure I’ll achieve my goal. So how about you? When you’re in writing mode, how many words per day do you write?
