Writing every day: application matters (even if you're a slacker millennial)

Replying to myself to note that I got my equinox math wrong. But, well, day length. Except apparently, in this specific case, not so much.

 

When I wrote my first book, I set a goal to write 2k words per day. I did it, too. The first draft of my book ended up at about 250k words. Now it is down to about 115k words in its (nearly) completed version. I feel that I pushed for word count when I should have taken my time and focused on story. It was, of course, my first book and I have little to no idea what I was doing, but I do feel that the word count goal contributed to a lot of unnecessary scenes.

On my second book I write every day but I don't count my words. I grab an hour or so here and there and just write until I have to stop. If I were to set a word count goal, I would aim for something more like 500-1000 per day. Still, I feel like it bothers the crafting of a good story too much.

 

I haven't been working on a certain project or anything, but I've tried to commit to writing consistently in my journal. I seem to be doing better with it when I am hand writing it versus typing.

 

I usually go for about 1 chapter of my book a day, which avgs out to 1k words for 80 chapters (technically at this point im editing but plishing things is sometimes even more writing than the first time around)

 

I've been trying to write more for the past two weeks, and I set two goals for myself; one, write every day and two, write at least 2,000 words a week. I have yet to accomplish the write every day part but I did write well over my weekly goal this past week.

5,000 words is a lot, I'm impressed! Once I noticed it took me about an hour to write 1,000 words, but maybe I'm just really slow. Which would be odd because I'm a fast typist. However I might have miscalculated the time.

 

1000 words an hour is pretty fast, It usually takes me 3-5 hours to write 1k words that feel right. Even then i have multiple edit cycles.

 

I usually do about 1K/hr. Different writers, different speeds!

 

I try not to edit as I go along, except to correct aggregious typos, otherwise my creativity suffers. That's probably why it only takes me that long.