That’s great that it shows people what they can do, but don’t get upset if you can’t write 50k in a month. You can hit that at lunch breaks.ĭon’t get all worked up over stuff like NaNoWriMo. If you write shorter stuff like YA you can do a novel in a year at that, and 1k a week is nothing. If you write a mere 1000 words a week you can write a pretty big novel in 2 years. If you can only write one day a week, do that. Most of us don’t quit the day job until we’ve written a bunch of books and have a sufficiently selling backlist to pay the bills.
Just take the time you do have and make the best of it and keep grinding until its done. When I started writing I owned my own business and was working crazy stupid hours. If you’ve still got one all the same principles apply, just adjust the times and word counts according to what you do have available. So find that comfy pace that maximizes your good productivity.ĭay jobs suck. Back then I’d write more in a day, but then spend twice as long editing. I’m comfy at 2k a day, but I also have to edit far less than when I was inexperienced. Don’t cry about it in public, that just makes you look piteous and pity doesn’t sell books. Sometimes life kicks you in the balls and that turns to 9 months or a year. Normally books take me between 3 and 6 months. My record for a book is 1 month, but that was 60k for the non-fiction gun book, which is a topic I’ve been pondering on for three decades, and I also had a bunch of blog posts that got cannibalized to serve as starting points for different chapters.
When you are in that zone, where the words are just flowing, just run with it as long as you can.ĭon’t do that thing where you stay up doing the all nighter (unless you’ve got no choice!) and keep writing after your brain is toast, because usually what happens the next day when you are coherent is you end up throwing that away no matter what.Īs a rule of thumb I almost never write after midnight or 1 AM, because at the time it’ll make sense and the next day it’s going to look like trash. Just get back to work.Ī fantastic day for me is when I get in the zone and write like 5k. If you didn’t produce yesterday like you wanted it does no good to fixate on that today. So it’s usually more like 3k, 1k, 4k, 2k, 0 because that’s just how life is sometimes, 2k, etc.Īnd don’t get worked up about it, because then you just get into your head and screw yourself up.
It’s never actually 2k though, because editing is slower than writing. Which means averaging 2k per week day, assuming I’m taking weekends off, which I usually do now. If you work like that very often you will burn out and get stupid.Ī normal week while writing a book my ideal goal is 10k. Which was an opportunity we’d be dumb to pass up, but which meant we needed eARCs by a much earlier date. That was to wrap of Son of the Black Sword, which I though I had more time to work on, but the deadline got moved up because we had a wonderful opportunity for it to be on the cover of a major wholesale catalog. However, that was brutal and I do not recommend it. In the Tower of Silence post somebody asked me what my record word count was for one day. Some writerly advice about production goals.
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