Lots of authors worry about the number of words they write per day. Some even post the tally on Facebook or Twitter as if they\u2019re in some kind of competition.<\/p>\n
And if they\u2019re not writing at least 500 or 1200 or 2000 words or whatever quota they\u2019ve set, they feel miserable. Why aren\u2019t they working harder? Why are they stuck? What\u2019s wrong with them? How come everyone else is racking up the pages?<\/p>\n
If that kind of system works for you, fine. But I think too many writers believe that if they\u2019re not actually physically writing a set number of words every single day, they\u2019re not just slacking, they\u2019re falling behind and even betraying their talent. Especially when they read on line about other people\u2019s booming word counts.<\/p>\n
How do they get caught in that kind of dead-end thinking? It\u2019s thanks to the endless blogs and books that urge writers to write every day and make that sound not just doable, but the norm. Some days, though, it\u2019s simply not possible. Hell, for some writers it\u2019s never possible. And why should it be?<\/p>\n
And if you can\u2019t eke out your daily quota, the advice sometimes goes that you should at least re-type what you wrote the previous day. Well, even if I weren\u2019t a slow typist, that\u2019s never had any appeal for me, either, or made much sense. I\u2019d rather switch careers then do something so mind-numbing.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t urge my creative writing workshop students to write every day; I suggest they try to find the system that works for them. I\u2019ve also never worried myself about how much I write every day because I\u2019m almost always writing in my head, and that\u2019s as important as putting things down on a page.<\/p>\n
But aside from that, every book, every project has its own unique rhythm. While recently working on a suspense novel, my 25th book, I found the last chapter blossoming in my head one morning while on the treadmill at the gym. Though I sketched its scenes out when I got home, I spent weeks actually writing it.<\/p>\n
Some people would call that obsessing. They\u2019d be wrong. What I did was musing, rewriting, stepping back, carefully putting tiles into a mosaic, as it were, making sure everything fit right before I went ahead, because this was a crucial chapter. I was also doing some major fact-checking, too, because guns are involved and I had to consult experts as well as spend some time at a gun range. It took days before I even had an outline and then a rough draft of ten pages, yet there were times when I wrote ten pages in a single day on this same book.<\/p>\n
The chapter was the book\u2019s most important one, where the protagonist and his pursuer face off, and it had to be as close to perfect as I could make it. So when I re-worked a few lines that had been giving me trouble and found that they finally flowed, it made me very happy.\u00a0 I was done for the day!<\/p>\n
And if I didn\u2019t write a word on any given day or days, I knew I would be, soon enough. Because the book was always writing itself in my head, whether I met some magical daily quota or not. I don\u2019t count how many words or pages I write a day, I focus on whether what I\u2019ve written is good, or even if it has potential with revisions. That\u2019s enough for me.<\/p>\n
Lev Raphael has been teaching creative writing at Michigan State University and you can now take a wide variety of online workshops him online at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lots of authors worry about the number of words they write per day. Some even post the tally on Facebook or Twitter as if they\u2019re in some kind of competition. And if they\u2019re not writing at least 500 or 1200 or 2000 words or whatever quota they\u2019ve set, they feel miserable. Why aren\u2019t they working … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[298,497,5,95,1247,219,321,165,166,197,19,242,290,214,495,132,206],"class_list":["post-5224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advice-for-writers","tag-advice-for-writers","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-creative-writing-workshops","tag-crime-fiction","tag-fiction","tag-inspiration","tag-motivation","tag-mysteries","tag-novels","tag-teaching-creative-writing","tag-the-writers-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-writing","tag-writing-tips","tag-writing-workshops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5224"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5691,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions\/5691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}