Setting a daily word count target

Why set a word count target?

Provided the target is set at a realistic level then it can be a useful motivational force. There's a great feeling of satisfaction from hitting a target, and that dopamine buzz becomes a healthy daily addiction which helps you reach your greater goal of finishing a writing project.

How many words should I aim for?

The quantity of words chosen should reflect your method of writing and the stage you have reached within the project. If your technique is slow and meticulous, not moving on until your paragraph is perfect (i.e. editing as you go), or if you have limited writing time available, then your daily target could be as low as 2–300 words. If you subscribe to the fast first draft method, which I recommend to those embarking on hefty works for the first time due to the satisfaction and motivation to be gained from seeing a rough form take shape before your eyes, set the target high. A top end daily target might be 1,500 or 2,000 words. More than that is certainly achievable, but it's hard to sustain a higher rate of productivity and to set your target higher than 2,000 words a day is likely to result in disappointment.

If you really want to achieve the maximum possible daily word count, I think the ideal conditions would be to shut yourself away in a remote hotel, full board, and alone. You'll have no distractions, no cooking or cleaning to worry about, and you will quickly be absorbed into your writing to the point where it can flood out of you at up to 500 words an hour. I've always considered somewhere like Venice the perfect location for such self-induced literary isolation, for some reason. I've yet to try it, but I reckon four to six weeks holed up in a hotel room overlooking the Grand Canal would get me at least to the end of the first draft of a novel, if not most of the redrafts too. When I'm writing a book, I'm never free of distractions for very long. Writing amongst people and pets I'm lucky if I write 500 words a day. I'd love to create an ideal writing environment, but like most authors I can't escape the commitments of daily life which always limit my output.

Salvador Dali wrote his only novel, Hidden Faces, in four months straight, working 14 hours a day. I don't have a precise word count for his book, but it looks to be in the region of 150,000 words. Assuming half of the four months were spent on the first draft and the rest was devoted to redrafting, that equates to an output of about 2,500 words per day in completion of that first draft. In a 14-hour working day that's less than 180 words per hour. If Dali didn't spend time redrafting, preferring instead to work slowly and methodically, not moving on until each paragraph was perfect, then his pace was more likely just 90 words an hour. That's about one of his typical paragraphs. Ninety words an hour is just one and a half words a minute. Sounds incredibly slow, doesn't it? And yet to complete such a lengthy work in just four months is a rate of output to which most writers can only aspire.

Dedicating an entire day to writing, give or take a few hours for basic human functions, can be an exciting event due to its rarity for most of us. Inevitably, the foreseen potential for progress fails to materialise and a certain amount of disappointment will creep in towards the end of the day. So anticipate that and put yourself under less pressure by setting a low word count target.

My daily writing time is very limited: is it still worth setting a target?

Yes, all the more so. Let's assume you can only find 60 minutes a day for writing. With just a single hour per day, you're looking at 365 creative hours per year. That's the same as almost 46 working days (in 8 hour chunks) dedicated to writing. Let's convert those hours and days into word counts, and let's assume your goal is to write a first draft of a novel totalling 80,000 words. What is a realistic word count for writing an hour per day? Obviously this depends on many factors including what stage you're at in your writing, your personal writing style, whether you've worked out the plot and the characters in advance or whether you're working this stuff out as you go along. Think you can manage 4 words per minute? Doesn't sound enough, does it? But 4 words per minute, across a whole hour, comes to about 250 words. So for someone with just an hour to spare, a reasonable writing target might be 250 words per day. Roughly four paragraphs. That's not much, is it? It's not even a page of A4 single spaced. Seems like an easy target, perhaps too lax, perhaps not enough ever to get that book finished? But let's extrapolate:

250 words per day × 365 days per year = 91,250 words

That's right. It's way more than you need to reach your target of 80,000 words. In fact, you could take about 40 days off from writing and still hit your target.

This is the power of regular writing. My published output is more than a million words. And yet I spend far more time not writing than actually hitting that keyboard. But still those books appear, slowly and steadily. Make it routine and it almost happens by itself.