Word Count

Another question that comes up from time to time is this: how many words should I write every day?

Seems to me that question is more along the lines of how much you have to produce in order to be considered a good writer. It’s an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, to measure the unmeasurable.

I fall into the camp of those who say it doesn’t matter and I write as much as I want or don’t want. My problem is not with setting a target for each day, but with how people will berate themselves if they miss it. If a person sets 2,000 words as their daily target, what happens when they can only get out 850? Trust me, it happens. Or what about sickness? Or vacation? Or the other interruptions of life?

For my part, at the end of a writing session I usually check to see how many words I produced. It’s a curiosity thing. Some days I feel like the keyboard must be about to catch fire because I’m typing so fast, and it’s interesting to me to see how many words I ended up with. On days where the words come out slower, I also find it interesting to check the count. Many times I actually produced more than I thought.

We can all do the math. If you write 2,000 words a day and the goal for a novel is 75,000 words, you’ll have a book in 37 1/2 days of writing. Will you hit that target in the bullseye every single day? Nope. Some days you’ll have more, some less.

It works for me to not have a daily goal. Maybe you want that, and that’s fine. All I can suggest is to go easy on yourself when things don’t go as planned.