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Do you have daily/weekly word count targets?
Stephen King apparently writes 2,000 words a day, every day. Michael Crichton claimed to write 10,000 words a day. And when Kazuo Ishiguro was writing The Remains of the Day, he went on a four-week ‘crash’ writing the whole first draft in one fell swoop. Whereas Gillian Flynn once said “My goals are never to hit a word count — I’ve tried that before and for me it leads to sloppy, panicked writing.”
I personally aim for 1,000 words a day when I’m drafting but don’t give myself word counts when I’m polishing or I tend to write in a rush and forget to focus on the form…
What about you?
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15 Replies
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I’ve tried word counts but never found them helpful. Planned time schedules are much more useful, whether to write for a just a short time or for longer ones.
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Oh that’s a good idea. I tend to allocate writing time in my schedule but also aim for 1,000 words and get quite stressed if I don’t hit it. Maybe I should try your method.
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Depends how useful you find stress, Holly 🙂
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Well, that’s the perennial question isn’t it! A little fire under me is good but I don’t like to feel like I’m burning!
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I work full time and have a young family so word targets don’t work for me I can go weeks without writing anything!
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Sounds like you have a healthy attitude to fitting writing into life and not the other way around!
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Holly,
This is a very interesting post. Below is a link to an article showing the daily word counts of various authors. As one can see, the numbers vary. Hemingway only got to 500—standing up.
https://writerswrite.co.za/the-daily-word-counts-of-39-famous-authors-1
Now, allow me to go on a little rampage about quantity vs. QUALITY. I know this is a wild tangent, but I am feeling in a wild tangent mood.
In my opinion, there is a CRAZY amount of emphasis placed on daily word counts by some people—with some even boasting they have put out four Amazon kindle novels this year. I pull up a Kindle sample and try to read one page of their stuff and I can’t do it. Much of that speed-writing is horrific. Add to that the problem of the five million books telling people all the things they absolutely must do to write their novels, with a hundred worksheets. The insanity must stop!
I think that people ought to give themselves permission to just slow down—and write something honest, and pure and good, in their own voice. If it is only 200 words a day. And not 2,000 words of more junk.
And learn to ignore 99.9 percent of the advice out there on what you absolutely must do with your novel—UNLESS that knowledge comes from Jericho writers.
There. That is my cranky old man column for the day. Now, I am going to buy more prune juice!!!
😊
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I enjoyed your crotchety rant and agree! 😆 Quality is always more important than quantity. I think there’s something to be said for writing fast and loose, and then spending time carefully editing. But writing fast and then publishing… I think only the very superhuman writers among us could get away with that.
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Absolutely, David! Your “cranky old man column for the day” has made my day.
One useful source of ‘advice for writers’ I can recommend — apart from Jericho Writers of course — is Masterclass.
I don’t recall Neil Gaiman mentioning word count in any of his lessons… He says lots of other great stuff instead.
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Can I add to this bit – the proliferation of people publishing books on Amazon is a curse and a boon. Some of the carefully crafted self published stuff is wonderful and I take my hat off to them, I don’t actually have a hat but a metaphorical hat. However, there’s a bit of the X Factor going on too – some people turn up to X Factor auditions full of themselves but nobody has told them they’re tone deaf or at least if they’ve been told they’ve chosen to ignore it.
The same is true of writers – some people can;t do it and they shouldn’t be writing – I started reading a book yesterday ( I won’t name the author and they’re not self published but it illustrates the point) the dialogue is excruciating, unrealistic for the scenes the characters find themselves in and the way they talk to each other in times of stress is the way they would be chatting sitting by the fire with a glass of wine – unrealistic and spoils what is actually a good plot.
I’m not a brilliant writer but the laziness of the writing i read only too often leaves me in despair, especially as some of these authors are making money and getting plaudits. It’s not professional jealousy just an observation. Just because everyone has a book in them doesn’t mean they need to write it.
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I so agree with you Danny.
Everyone might have a book in them. But, in 99.99% of cases, that is exactly where it ought to remain.
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Agree, agree, with the last two comments. It’s the same with stand-up comedy gigs. With the proliferation of ‘open mic’ nights if you hit one good comic in every 4 you’re doing well. The other three will be dire.
I reckon on Amazon if you hit one properly written book in 10 you are doing very well. And by properly written I mean a book that avoids everything Danny Boyd describes in his middle paragraph.
In the process of promoting my own debut novel I have joined a number of writer Facebook groups. Most of them abound with fledgling authors urging others to look at a sample of their work. For a while, I did. But….oh dear! -
I think there are two issues at stake here.
The first is this question of throughput. It is, to put things mildly, disingenuous. Words per day depends on two direct factors, and two indirect factors. The direct factors are words per (active) hour, and actual time actively writing. If you have interruptions – whether it’s life getting in the way, or just that you’re not feeling the hum – the actual hours will reduce, and thereby the words per day.
Personally, when in the throes of getting words out, I aim to work myself up to in excess of 1000 words per hour. And, on a good day, I can pump out as many as six active hours of such productivity.
But… that is when the visible part of the writing is happening. Before that, I’m spending inordinate amounts of time defining my story, building my world, figuring out the what and how and why of the whole mess. Which accounts for far more time than does the writing itself.
There are some aspects of my writing, even at that speed, which as pretty damned good, even if I do say so myself. Setting coherence and integrity, point-of-view perspective (what the PoV character could actually be aware of), etc. But there are some things I downright suck at, like dialogue.
And then, any editing… I have been known to spend in excess of an hour editing a single, ten-word sentence. Yes, less than 1% of my “base” throughput rate.
Taking all that into account, what is my writing speed? A variable point between 6 and 1200 words per hour. All of which tells us just about nothing.
The second issue is this one of quality as several have mentioned. It, too, is a messier subject than we would all like it to be. How are we to measure the quality of a piece of writing? What aspect matters to us?
Is it the artfulness of the prose? Is it the fine characterisation? Perhaps the intricacy of plot? The suspension of disbelief? Pacing? Emotional impact? Setting coherence? Grammatical consistency? Or any of myriad other aspects?
And, to make matters more complicated still, how good do we need the work to be on each of those axes? I am a stickler for some, and almost dismissive of others; I’ve talked to people – here – who are concerned about the others, yet all but unaware of the some. There are patterns of expectation by genre and by audience age (which could explain the whole YA phenomenon to some extent – less picky). A lot of the frictionless self-publish-to-kindle dross doesn’t score on any axes. But once we rise above that, into say the top 10% of what’s out there, opinions will diverge.
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And, to make matters more complicated still, how good do we need the work to be on each of those axes?
Very interesting point. Years ago I managed to get through the door for a meeting at the BBC concerning a script submission. The producer started the meeting by saying “We get around 3,000 script submissions a month. Yours is in the top 2%. Here is why. It is type-written (pre computer days), it is exactly the right length for a program slot, it will require no more than 3 sets and has minimal ‘outside broadcast’ (pre video days, when film was expensive), the dialogue is good and finally it’s funny.”
So clearly I had hit 6 of the axes!
He then continued “now, let me tell you what is wrong with it”.
Axis no. 7 was the killer – characterisation. It sucked. Each character sounded the same. 🙁
(It never got made)-
Once upon a time, there were gatekeepers with structured checklists. You were lucky to get a peek at theirs.
In today’s world, where the gatekeeper role has been inverted and is held by those who hawk their pet wares the loudest… [insert crotchety rant]
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