Words Per Day

This post is about creative writing and probably wouldn’t apply to professionals that have to meet a minimum word count per day. As a fiction writer, I haven’t set a minimum and I think this is why I’m able to write a fair amount in different genres. The low stress approach means I don’t look at the word counter and panic if I only see double digits. To be honest, I really don’t even understand why a word count per day is important. Sure, if you write only one word per session and you don’t have a lifespan of hundreds of years, then it would be a problem. But if you have a bad week where you don’t write at all, what does it matter if you write a lot the week after? But what is a lot?

The novel that I’m querying took me about six weeks to write, but this does not count the research I did before I began writing. I wrote five days per week, so I suppose that means about three thousand words per day. But this doesn’t take into account the hours I spent per writing session. Some days I wrote only for two or three hours, other times I wrote for eight hours. This also doesn’t take into account my flash fiction writing that I publish on my website. Perhaps three thousand words in eight hours seems quite low, but I think it seems quite high for two hours of work. I did once write more than twenty thousand words in six days, but it damn near killed me and most of it was terrible.

It could be that I lack the experience to be able to reach a much higher word count. Or maybe my word count is above average for a fiction writer. But does it really matter for a novelist? In the next post, I will try to tackle my writing process. I actually do have one!