I began tracking how many words I write each day. Not so much to write more but to see what I normally produce. And since I haven’t missed a day, there is built-in pressure not break the chain, which means putting words down every day.
I could graph my daily progress, but it looks like an awful mess. There have been 300 word days and 3,000 word days. Often one after another. I seem to have evened out though in the last couple of weeks and settled down to roughly 1,100 words a day.
- January: 1,146
- February: 1,201
- YTD average: 1,172
- Total words: 69,143
- Estimate of annualized total: 425,000+
I’m pretty happy with this rate. I hear a lot of professionals say they write 2,000 words a day. Something in the 1,000-1,100 rate is just fine for me, a part-timer.
400,000 is about four novels worth. That’s what some fairly prolific writers (Stephen King) produce per year.
Now, are these all good words? Of course! Otherwise I wouldn’t have written them. And they will stay good, until I read them over.