I’m in awe of authors who can crank out 5-10K words a day. And there are a lot of them out there. To achieve my own writing goals, I don’t necessarily need to achieve those heroic word counts. But I would like to bump up my productivity significantly.

Ideally, I’d like to consistently write at least 5000 thousand words a week. While that’s an order of magnitude less than many writers, those words still add up. If I can keep that pace up for at least ten months, I’m at 200K words per year. That’s a couple of novel’s worth, or four novellas, or forty short stories, or some combination thereof. (Of course, many of those words will end up deleted, or archived forever, so there’s something to be said for surplus words.)

Right now I’m about 40K words into a new novel, running at about 3,000 words per week. On average I’m writing about 250 words per hour. I write for 2-3 hours most mornings, and then my brain feels ready to do something else. That’s not very fast, and I know there are ways to improve my output.

Why is productivity important? As author Matt Wallace just pointed out in a great Twitter thread, writing (the actual writing of words part) is one of the few things that authors control. We don’t fully control who publishes our work, who reads it, who buys out books, which bookstores allow us to schedule readings, who reviews our books, and who enjoys our books. What we can control, more or less, is writing and revising the actual words on the page. We can nudge the other things, but we can’t control outcomes to the extent that we can control our own writing process.

The November Productivity Test

Starting today, and continuing through the month of November (40 days), I’m going to apply the following rules to my writing practice in an attempt to exceed 5000 words per week:

  1. No internet (turn off wifi on my laptop). If I need to look something up, I’ll add in a placeholder, and add the item to a “to research” list.
  2. 20+ minutes of moderate physical exercise before I start writing (walk the dog, pushups, etc.)
  3. Use the first half hour of my writing session (9:30am-10am) to outline the scene or scenes I’m going to write, include short descriptions, dialogue sketches, motivations and conflicts, etc.
  4. From 9:30am-12:30am, using the Pomodoro method (25 minutes of writing, 5 minute break).
  5. Share my word count on Twitter at the end of each writing session.

Wish me luck! May you have a productive and enjoyable November.

Other Stuff

  • The review contest for The Sky Woman is still open (and will be through December 31st). If you read the book and leave a review on amazon and/or goodreads, you’re eligible to win two tickets to WorldCon Dublin or $500 cash (your choice). Anyone can enter. There are a bunch of other prizes as well. So far I have fewer entries than prizes, so your chance of winning something is currently at 100%.
  • I’ll be launching a Patreon account November 1. Some posts on this blog, and some future posts, will switch to patron-only (at the $3+/month tier).
  • I have some readings coming up in NYC Nov. 15th and 16th — if you’re in that area I hope you can attend one of the events.