Writing a Novel: How Much to Write a Day

I got an e-mail today from an aspiring writer. She wanted to know how much she should write each day if she wanted to call herself a novelist. My first instinct was to tell her to do the math. You want to finish your novel in X number of days, and you want it to be Y number of words long. So do the math. Then I realized this wasn't really a helpful answer. Anyone can do the math.

She wanted a goal for writing a novel, and I have a really hard time setting goals for other people. I'm not the one writing her book. But an answer like that is maddeningly unhelpful. So I thought about it a while. I thought about it as I composed an article I'd been meaning to get to. I thought about it as I worked on a rough draft for my third novel. And I thought about it as I edited the manuscript for my second non-fiction book. Then, realizing I'd been awake for 27 hours, I took a nap.

When I woke, the e-mail was still sitting there. The e-mail gremlins hadn't  answered this girl in my absence. It was time to come up with a real answer. I realized that I had one that came straight out of my own experience. When I started writing my first novel, Arianna's Tale, I wrote maybe 500 words a day. 500 usable words. Sometimes that meant I'd write 2000 but only keep 500. So that seems like a good answer to me.

Sort of. Finally, I decided that the answer was this: Start by writing 500 usable words a day. Every day. Holidays, weekends, days you feel so sick you can't sit up. Type them, scribble them on notepaper, whatever. But get 500 words done every day. If you think you can't write tomorrow, write 750 today and 750 the day after tomorrow to stay on track. Deal with writer's block in any way that allows you to meet these goals. But meet them. No excuses. If I made excuses, my first novel never would have been completed.

Over time, and well before I'd finished the first novel, those 500 words became too easy. I'd have them done shortly after breakfast. Then I'd waste the rest of the day doing whatever came into my head. So I upped my goal. I decided that I could write 1000 each day (not including all the discarded junk, of course). I was getting better at putting my idea, my story, onto paper (actually, into the computer). By the time I approached the end of Dragon's Tempest, I was writing 2500 usable words a day. Now, halfway through Thief's Heartache, I'm writing an average of 4000 words a day. Some days I allocate some of this word count to another project, but I always meet this goal.

So my answer to the question would be this: start with 500 words every day. When that become too easy, adjust it so that you're still writing, still working towards that finished product. If you don't miss a day, you'll soon find yourself with a completed novel on your hands.