Jul 23, 2017 · 1 min read
A thousand words a day (minimum) is totally doable. I wrote the first draft of a SFF trilogy — about 270,000 total words — in 9 months, from September 2016 through May 2017. I purposely scheduled myself to write every day; some days, I didn’t at all, other days I wrote more than my quota.
Important lessons I learned in the process:
- Allow yourself to write the minimum, even if you skipped a day. Unless you’re on a deadline, your schedule can slip a few days without the world coming to an end.
- Allow yourself to stop even if you’re bursting to go on. This will allow you to be ready to start off with a bang the next day.
- Write wherever you can and with whatever tools you have at your disposal. Even though I prefer writing in Scrivener on my MacBook Pro, I learned to reach my quota using their iOS app on my iPhone and a few times resorting to pen and paper when my laptop wasn’t with me.
- Only tangential to consistent word count, but I realized I am a natural hybrid plotter / pantser. I memorialized the “headlights” of the novels one book at a time but did not fully outline any of them. Rather, I captured notes during the writing to ensure continuity, character associations, location information, made-up words & phrases, etc. This eased the burden of fretting over every plot point long before I started writing.
I’m still editing the books and hope to have them ready for query by the fall. Wish me luck!
