It’s the question everybody asks and almost nobody really answers. How much should you write a day? The honest answer is “it depends.” But a bare “it depends” doesn’t help anyone, so here are some numbers, and what they depend on.
What it depends on
The time you actually have. Not the time you’d have in an ideal life with a cabin in the woods. This week’s time, with its job, its dinners and its load of laundry still sitting in the machine.
Where you are in the process. A drafting day is measured in words. A revision day can end with fewer words than it started with and still be a great day. A planning day has no novel words at all, and it counts just the same.
Whether you know what happens in the scene. Sitting down with the scene already worked out (what the character wants, what gets in the way, how it ends) makes a real difference to how much you get down in the same amount of time, because you’re not stopping to decide at every sentence.
Your speed. It varies enormously from person to person, and from day to day for the same person. When drafting, lots of people land somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand words an hour. Your number is yours, and the only way to find it is to keep track for a couple of weeks.
Realistic ranges
As a rough guide, none better than the others:
- 200 or 300 words. Half an hour snatched before work or after the kids are in bed. Three hundred words is roughly one page of a printed book. A page a day is a novel in less than a year.
- 500 words. A relaxed hour for a lot of people. A comfortable cruising speed.
- 1,000 words. A long session, or a very good half hour if you write fast and the scene was clear.
- 1,667 words. The number behind the famous November challenge: 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s a sprint, not a year-round pace, and skipping it is perfectly fine.
The math: how long it would take you
A mid-length novel comes in at around 80,000 words. Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, aims for exactly that: 41 scenes of roughly 2,000 words each. With that number, the math is easy:
80,000 words at different paces
Words a day
Every day
5 days a week
300
267 days almost 9 months
54 weeks just over a year
500
160 days just over 5 months
32 weeks about 7 months
1,000
80 days about 2½ months
16 weeks almost 4 months
Notice something: 300 words five days a week adds up to the same as 500 words three days a week. Both come to 1,500 a week, and both finish the draft in just over a year. If writing every day is hard for you, you can write more on fewer days. Three 1,000-word sessions a week get the draft done in about six months.
One more thing: these numbers are for the first draft. Planning ahead saves drafting time, and revising afterwards takes time of its own. Better to know that now than in month eleven.
Sessions, not just words
Counting words has a catch: some days, words aren’t the point. Days for thinking through a tricky scene, for shuffling chapters around, for realizing Bruno is 82, not 62, and you need to fix it in three places. The count that day is zero, and you still worked.
An alternative that works for a lot of people: track sessions or time. “I sit down for 30 minutes, four days a week.” That part is up to you. How many words come out of that half hour depends on plenty of things you don’t control, which makes word counts a poor measure of your effort. Show up for the sessions and the words will come.
Why streaks can cost you
Streaks (how many days in a row you’ve written) are hugely motivating. Until they break. A flu, a week of moving, a kid with a fever. And when the counter drops back to zero, lots of people react the same way: they lose the will to start over from nothing. What used to be a push turns into a debt.
Streaks also nudge you to write anything at all just to keep them alive. Fifty halfhearted words at 11:55 p.m., only so the number keeps climbing.
Sunday Plot has no streaks, on purpose. No productivity percentages either, and no counters that break. It shows you what you’ve done, never the days you didn’t.
Tips
- A ridiculously low minimum and a reasonable maximum. The minimum (fifty words, one sentence, opening the file) lets you start on bad days. The maximum leaves you something for tomorrow.
- Count by the week. 2,500 a week can be spread out however suits you. A slow Monday gets made up on Thursday, no drama.
- Check your pace after a month, using what you actually wrote, not what you wish you had. Then adjust the date to your pace, not the other way around.
For today
Do the math with your own numbers. Think about how many sessions you really have each week, roughly how much you write in each, and divide your target length by that. If the date you get feels far away, remember that every week brings it closer.
In Sunday Plot you set your novel’s target length, and the Structure screen suggests how many scenes each beat gets. Thinking in scenes instead of words tends to take a lot of pressure off: it’s not 80,000 words, it’s 40 scenes. One per session. On the Writing screen you tick each one off with “I’ve written it” and see how many you’ve done. No day counter waiting to be broken by one rough Tuesday.