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In the past, it seemed as if I could knock out 5000 words a day without any problem. In fact, 5000 words was my minimum goal a day when I was working on my novels and those words seem to come with no problem. Now it seems that 2000 words is about as much as I can take and 3000 words is a chore. I don't know if maybe it is what I am writing that is causing such a lack of production or if I have been over extending myself.
I wonder, how many words do most writers get to each day? Is it every day? Every other day? Once a week?
I would like to become a professional writer (I want books and movie deals, damn it), but wonder what is a reasonable daily output. I just wrote 3000 words on the cure and it's taken me 2 hours (though I did spend some time on skype with Erin).
Comments
You're complaining?
God, I type so slowly, I'm lucky to get two thousand words a day, when I feel like writing. I cheer if I get a thousand words in a day which probably explains why I'm still a glazing contractor. I wrote religiously everyday when I wrote Assassin and it still took over a year to finish, not counting the many edits. For some reason I haven't felt like writing as of late so my stories go unfinished. My hat is off to you if you're only writing two or three thousand words a day, Arecee
Yes, I'm complaining
I didn't mean for this to be some sort of pissing contest. I do know how to type, so I don't have that handicap. The thing is I am not writing every day. I may write three times a week. I get distracted by certain things that I really shouldn't. Met games rank high on that list.
I just am feeling like I should be accomplishing more. I don't know the quality of some pieces but I see some post 9 or 10 stories a week and I am barely getting out a chapter every three days. I don't know if its a lack of motivation or maybe it's time to pack in my keyboard and leave the literary world for a while. I have novel ideas that aren't TG and I've been wanting to get to them for the longest. Though Erin says I can post them on Big Closet, I doubt I will. I get enough grief for the things I do post, and I don't want people clamoring for a cross dressing scene when I know there isn't one coming.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
Consider yourself lucky....
...I can't even start. I'd be grateful to put out even a hundred words a day. But in the past, here's how the writing process has gone for me.
1. I have a great idea, but the amount of research is too overwhelming.
2. I write a couple of paragraphs, and decide I need a better opening. I start over.
3. I write a few pages, realize the story isn't working--there are problems with logic, or I'm just plain stuck. I start over.
4. An instructor or friend criticizes a minor flaw. I start over.
5. The story still doesn't work--the dialogue is clunky, and I realize that I have been so isolated my whole life that my sole guide to the way people act, think and feel has come from movies and TV sitcoms. Therefore my story gets branded "unrealistic." I give up.
This is one area in which having a disability gets in the way, too. Judging from the movies I've seen and the books I've read, a disabled person is not only expected to be creative, intelligent, and artistic, but required to be. The only people with disabilities the media ever pay attention to are folks like Christie Brown (the "My Left Foot" author). God help you if you're disabled and mediocre. So the pressure to achieve can be tremendous.
Livin' A Ragtime Life,
Rachel
There are times...
Where I can barely get 100, let alone 1k words down, and other where I get in the zone and can crank out 10k words in a sitting. For me, how "into" what I'm writing determined how much I wrote, not including other distractions like Real Life.
Peace be with you and Blessed be
How many words a day???
Wow, that's a tough one.
For me it depends a great deal on the subject matter.
Of course there are some days when all I do is lounge around or spend all day doing research.
Then again when I'm being productive (overly) I might produce as much as ten thousand words a day (pre-revisions).
I think I could safely say I produce about five hundred to a thousand words a day (after all revisions) when I track the number of days I've spent and the total output achieved (ex. 175,000 words over roughly half a year... 170 to 200 days).
As far as feeling productive... well... I guess I'm upset with myself if I don't put out at least two thousand words in a day. That's pre-edit and the final product is likely to be a little less although recently it has been about ten percent greater than my original output. Go figure....
Just remember quantity isn't the end all of a story.
Anesidora
Writing
I used to write a lot. I'm not sure of word count because I never really check that kind of thing. For me its about pages and IO used to be able to knock off anywhere between 5-8 pages a day. Lately I'm lucky to pull off a few pages a week now. I guess I'm just getting too wrapped up in Real Life lol.
Words per Day
I would estimate that I average about 100 words a day, 50 - 75 of which may survive. Heck there are some weeks I may re-write the same chunk of text multiple times and not add anything new. With that said, there are lot of 10 or less word days rounded up by infrequent 500 word days. At a guess, there are only 5 or so times when I wrote more than a 1000 words in a day.
its not about the numbers
When i'm on a roll I might get out two pages an hour but the word count will vary dramatically depending on whether its all text or conversation, an average Gabysode is six pages long and between 1400 and 2100 words. I have been known to write two chapters a day but usually its not so impressive.
Professional writers very often don't write, they dictate, so okay they will scribble a few notes but the actual words won't be typed by them. You can get a lot more out that way.
Of course if you do direct type just your typing speed can be an issue - i can't type for toffee, i might manage two fingers, so compared with a competent typist i'm at a distinct disadvantage.
Personally I prefer to get a couple of hundred quality words down than a thousand of drivel.
Just my two penna'th
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Personally i dont have a set amount
For me it's pretty staggered, sometimes i get about a a day a week to really sit down and write. And It all depends on the mood I'm in, sometimes I'll maybe get 500 words in that week. and sometimes I'll write over 5000 words a day the next week.
My advice is don't time yourself nor compare yourself on how long it takes to write your stories. there is no set bar on what is "reasonable" because we are all different.
_Alexander
Words
When I'm really working on stories, my output can go from barely 1000 a day to 5000 or more. I'm a moderately fast typist, 50 or 60 wpm w/o errors but what slows me down is thinking and going back to change or add things.
Even when no one sees what I'm writing, I usually write on something every day.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
A good day
A good day for me is 1000 words or more. I think my record in a single day was somewhere around 3000 words and that was highly unusual. Most days I'm lucly to get 500 and then there are the days where I will repeatedly write something and repeatedly delete each iteration.
Have delightfully devious day,
I haven't gotten much writing
I haven't gotten much writing done lately. And it depends on how much time I spend. But I've done as little as a few hundred words in a day (or none) up to 20-30 thousand words in a day (though I haven't done more than 10k or so in a while). It depends on what I'm writing, how into it I am, and what distractions there are. But I tend to feel that I'm slacking off if I don't get at least 2000 words in any single sitting.
Saless
"But it is also tradition that times *must* and always do change, my friend." - Eddie Murphy, Coming To America
How many WPD?
Gosh I've got no fixed figure. With one-off stories, I can punch off a 5 to 7 thousand-word story in an afternoon if all the plots and charecters are more or less fixed in my head and I have an ending in sight.
Those are the easy ones and I punch out about one per six months of those. Readers will have noticed that a lot of my stories start off well because they originated as short stories with tight plots and a well developed characters and storylines.
Then I get concieted if I get some good reviews and I spoil it all by continuing the story too long and it turns to drivel. I have to disciplin myself to keep the story line tight and more importantly, interesting.
When these stories get too convoluted (Like The Ram did,)Ilose the plot and start churnining out drivel because I feel obliged to give the readers something as often as possible. This is literary suicide but Vanity, thy name is Beverly!!!
I've tried to discipline myself now to complete a story or at least the bulk of it before even posting the first chapter so as to give readers some continuity and story memory without having to re-read chapters to recover the plot, (If there is one.)
Readers will have noticed that 'Angry mermaid has stopped for just this very reason, I want to finish it then post one chapter a day.
Bearing in mind there's about 25 more chapters to completion of Angry Mermaid that means a bit of a desert from this quarter.
In addition to this, we all have 'bad days' well read bad weeks and bad months for this crazy old, mixed up wierdo. Real life can be pretty bloody sometimes.
After my friend Aerie's sucide I've sort of gone through a big black hole and I'm still not over it. These sorts of events can be catastrophic for all the friends affected by them and no amount of mutual mourning seems to ease the hurt. I'm desperately sad but I can't forgive her. How bad is that? My writing has, like lots of other things, taken a nose dive. Nothing for days then a mad burst of manic effort producing incoherent,drivel that needs to be re-hashed about five times. When these bouts strike, It's best to grip the edge of the chair and keep your fingers well away from any keyboard.
My therapy then is to get on the bike and pedal until I'm far, far away both physically and in my head. The other day I found myself over a hundred miles from home and having to book into a B&B. My wife was desperately worried until I phoned her that evening and explained. Life can be shit, and then some. At the moment I simply cannot sit for longer than a couple of hours at my lap-top before stuff comes back to bother me about my friend.
Then of course there's real life issues to be getting on with.
So words-per-day can be the least of my worries, but it means no stories at present.
Happy writing, Katie.
OXOXOX
Bev.