When I made my statement (1500-2500) I only counted the writing days... I'm not a professional writer so I don't write every day. Also I don't use everything I write in that day, so obviously it's not final quality work. But I think there's a lot of variables involved here... The title wants to know "how many can you bang out" so I read it as an evening of casual keyboard-smashing. I just book a specific timeframe during which I write (usually 2 hours but I often work for 3 or so), preceded by about half an hour of preparation and followed by a motivational self reward (usually an ice cream). However if I end up doing focused research about relevant topics, or I'm editing, or anything else I still count it as the same time spent and therefore the same effort made and I count it as a similar result. So I guess my estimate could be described as equivalent word value of work put in.
Due to feeling peer pressure, I just banged out a 1500 word love scene that's been on my mind for a while. *fist pump - and not the rude kind!* Oh, I feel better now. I guess if I included the word count of my online posts and PMs, the numbers might not look so bad. hehe Well okay, I laughed at this just because it was so detailed. I should give myself an ice-cream as a reward, only that I don't especially like ice-cream.
I kept myself to 3000 words / day while I worked on my WIP. I've probably re-written 75% of those lines in the edits.
I generally write about 2k per day but its mostly long-winded essays in one online forum or another for politics, photography, news, or whatever else strikes me. It's writing for free, so I don't really think too much about word count. Since I began my current project two weeks ago I've averaged, if you count each day, about 2000+ words for a current total of about 30k. My book will likely come in at around 50,000 words total, and will have close to a hundred photos included, which will put the finished product at about 250 pages- nonfiction. I've never really made it beyond a page of writing for fiction and doubt I ever will. While I believe I have a great imagination to dream up all kind of strange and interesting worlds and characters, I just have too much Vulcan blood in me and, therefore, have a very limited collection of adjectives and adverbs, and the only time I'm good with similes is when I'm cracking jokes (and half of those are clichés). I suck at fiction. But for non fiction I can pump out several thousand words in one sitting without a problem, and I'm pretty good with research online. For example, if I were tasked with writing an essay on baseball I could hit 7,500-10,000 words in a day. But obviously, it would take longer than that to edit and revise. For non fiction the writing is easy. The editing is frustrating because I then get to cringe as I find the same expressions used over and over and have to rewrite them to avoid redundancy.
Depends. When I have the motivation and insight on what I want to write I can write up to 5-6 pages in a few hours.
If I get started early enough, I can manage 5000-7000 words in one session before my brain has a core meltdown and I no longer know what the heck I'm doing. This happens maybe 2-3 times a month. Usually, when I sit down to write, I'm determined to get at least 1800 words in. They don't have to be pretty. They don't have to be in the right place. I know that a lot of them will get eliminated, or swapped out for better words, when I revise. But getting the story out of my head and onto the page in the first place is the hardest part of writing for me, so I just let the words be ugly and awkward, as long as they tell the story. Once I get past 1800, I start to think, "Hey! Only 700 more words to go before you hit 2500! Why not keep going?" So, unless I'm really tired, I do. And sometimes, those last 150 words get pecked out while I struggle to keep my eyes open.
Wow I feel bad. Some of those numbers are huge. I am just making sure I write every day, whether that's 100 words when time is short or more when I can lock myself away for hours on end
My stats are only when life doesn't get in the way, and i can easily go three to four months at a time without writing as well, but I'm determined to not let that happen any more.
It's not a contest. My anecdotal evidence from writing forums is that most published authors write a book a year or every two years. If you do 40k a year you're in good company.
Well, I do have days when the best I can do is peck out a couple of hundred words on my phone while on the bus. And while I try to write every day, life has a bad habit of intervening--or I have a day like this past Saturday, where I just needed to get caught up on sleep and not do anything I didn't absolutely have to. (The cats got fed, and that was it.) We do what we can. It's not a contest. That you're managing to do something every day is great--don't feel bad!
I have really bad, intermittant concentration issues that affect recall and my ability to order and prioritise, so even when I have an idea, I often can't act on it. I'd love a bit of mental stability as that might iron out some of the peaks and troughs I experience, but I'm not holding my breath. Instead I just try to do my best to write something —anything— while I can. A strike while the iron is hot kinda deal. I've been known to bang out as many as 10,000 words in one session, but I'm as likely to stare blankly at my screen trying to remember how to punctuate. I'm lucky right now but, unfortunately, I never know how long the good spell will last.
Well, now that I've been thoroughly schooled in the word count game, I have to say that I only get in an average of 500-600 words each time I write. Though to be fair, I spend maybe a half-hour to an hour on each session, so I think it's a fair number. I also remember a quote from Malcolm Gladwell: "All hail the tortoise." For me, it's a matter of the quality of content rather than the amount. I can spend a block of time writing a good page and a half, but most likely it'll turn out like I was hammering away at the keyboard with my face, and in turn I have to go back and rework so much of it or completely rewrite it. Most of the times I've written only a half page at a time, I feel confident enough in it that I would be willing to show it to someone. So, all hail the tortoise! I'm probably going to go buy a statue of a tortoise and build a shrine around it and bow down to it everyday.
When I'm writing, it's about 500-1000 words per session. I've gone up to 2,000 words in a session a few times when I was really inspired and had a lot of time. I don't think I've ever written 3,000 words in a day. That's a stratospheric number to me. I care very deeply about the sound, rhythm, and imagery of my prose. About 90% of my writing time is spent staring off into space, thinking about how best to phrase a sentence. More time is spent reading my current paragraph(s) aloud, making sure the new sentence fits in properly. There's no way I could write 5,000 to 10,000 words per session when I'm so concerned about stuff like that.
Depends on how I feel. I've written entire 8,000 word chapters in a day, but I don't like doing that. It will leave your fingers bleeding. I usually aim for weekly goals of 1 chapter per week. Usually that comes down to 4,000-6,000 words a week.
I don't really worry about word count, what I do is write a complete chapter in one sitting. If that chapter is 1,000 words, or 3,500 words, it doesn't matter. I write until I feel the chapter has reached a natural conclusion and the next part needs a new chapter. Some nights I am doing research for hours to find a specific point, it is no less important than the evenings I write. I am not motivated by the number of words I write when I sit at my keyboard, only that what I do write works.
I've finally started becoming what you might call a "consistent writer". I used to be very sporadic and undisciplined, only writing when inspiration hit, so it's been really fun to finally see progress being made in such a short amount of time. There's been a lot of discussion about how to become a great writer, and I think this is it. Just writing a whole bunch. That's what my personal progress is telling me anyways. So how many words do you guys write on average in a month? Do you set goals and stuff? I'm really interested to see the differences in people here.
A month? Recently its been in around at least 50,000, but I'm always writing short stories to try and practice describing ideas, movements, conversations. So, more than that.
I used to do 520K a year (10K a week) but since I started getting busier with the business side of writing I've cut back to 365K a year (1K a day). But I don't do it consistently. This week I've been on vacation and I've written about 25K - when I go back to work there will be weeks when I'll only do 1 or 2K.
I don't keep to a writing schedule, though I probably should. When I'm fully engaged in a story, I write between 1,000 and 1,500 words per day. Between stories, I don't write anything except possibly notes for upcoming stories. I'm just beginning a new story now, one which will likely wind up being a novelette or novella. I don't see it becoming close to a full-length novel. I think it has potential to be really good, and I might be able to sell it to a science fiction magazine.
It's always anyway. Never with an s. But I'm happy to hear you feel you are making progress. There is something great about being a prolific writer. Sometimes I feel that way. I couldn't really tell you how many words I write a month. A month is a really long time, and how many words I'm writing during that long period of time is not something I care to keep track of. I have things like I want to write a short story or a chapter. Each usually take a week or less, I would say. Or maybe I get caught up in writing poetry for a month. It takes me such a long time to write poetry. With something like that, you simply can't judge by a word count. And everything needs revision. I don't really want to put off revision. I find it works best for me to almost revise as I go or shortly after. What I try to do with shorter things is have something ready to go out on submission every week. And it's just such a combination of writing things that go into that. But my goal is to get into these publications so I try every week. With longer works I wanted to aim for a chapter a week, but I've got caught up in editing it a few times. And there was this other novel that I just wasn't enjoying so I stopped. But when I return to something book length I still think I will have the weekly goal of something like a chapter a week. The problem with having a monthly goal is that a lot of people would wait until the end of the month. Weekly goals allow for less procrastination.
Heck. It sounds like I'm the world's slowest writer. The most I have ever written in a single day is 2,000 words. I only write short stories (at the moment - I have 50,000 words of potential novel I've been ignoring for 2 years) and when I sit down to work on those I aim to get a minimum of 500 words down in a sitting. Most of my 'writing' time though is actually spent reading, thinking and redrafting. And I don't write every day. I'll maybe get a 3,000 word first draft out in little chunks over a week or two, then keep going back to it a bit at a time, adding, deleting, tweaking on and off for a month. Then forget about it for three months (for me, the 'brewing' time is the really important bit). Then go back and have another play with it for a few days. Then hopefully polish it up all ready to go. Until last week, I hadn't written anything (new words on a page) for over a month. As an estimate then, the number of words I get onto a page in a month would probably average out at around 2K a month. Probably worth noting that I'm not published and not completely certain whether that's something I'm interested in. It's possible my writing schedule isn't that of anyone who ever would get published!
There's nothing wrong with being slower - there are great writers who take a decade to write their books. It wouldn't fit in with a certain modern (e-inspired) marketting plan, but there are lots of other ways to publish, if you decide you want to. I'd also say that the reason I keep track of words by year, rather than by day, week, or month, is that I don't think the short-term measures are as meaningful. If someone writes 50K in a weekend but then doesn't write another word for three months, that person isn't a fast writer, s/he's just a binge-writer. Again, nothing wrong with that style of writing, but it can be deceptive in terms of measuring overall productivity. In general I think it's more useful to look at "finished" words on a longer time frame. A lot of the time when people count rough words they don't acknowledge that those words might be rewrites of old scenes, or parts of books that don't go anywhere because only the "easy" parts were written, etc. Anyways, main point - not a sprint, not a contest of any sort, and not enough data presented in this threads. (And "anyways" is a perfectly acceptable colloquialism. I wouldn't use it with the queen, but... I don't think she's here.)
