by Rachel Aaron
When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli’s novel #4), I had some problems. I had a new baby and my life (like every new mother’s life) has always been pretty much normal. She paid a nanny four times a week to give herself time to write, and she served those hours like a mother bear protecting her cubs from her: with violence and pedestrian violence. To stick to my schedule and meet my deadlines, I had to write 4,000 words in each of these carefully planned sessions. I thought it would be simple. After all, before I quit my job to write full time, I was writing 2k a day in the three hours before work. Surely with 6 hours of free time to write baby, 4k a day would be nothing….
Resources:
Keep writing and good luck!
Stephen King (2000 words)
Born September 21, 1947, Stephen Edwin King is an American author known for his horror, suspense, and fantasy novels. King’s work has also been adapted into television series and movies.
Stephen King is considered one of the most prolific writers of all time because his fantastic and supernatural novels are very long. However, this does not mean that he writes a huge number of words every day.
Stephen King: 2000 words
Stephen King is probably one of the most prolific writers of all time. His novels can be very long and wordy, so you would think that he writes a lot of words every day.
However, this is not always the case.
In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King talks about his writing speed. He set a daily goal of around 2,000 words. That would be around 180,000 words in three months of writing. He also said that the maximum time a person can complete a first draft is three months. If it takes longer, it becomes more and more difficult to come back to the story in the right mindset. Additionally, King is often able to engage in marathon writing sessions. He wrote The Running Man in a week.
Step 1: Show up to write every day
This may seem obvious, but it shows something I’ve struggled with for the past 10 years as a professional writer.
On days when he didn’t have specific tasks, he sometimes let the writing slip away. Weeks and months passed without writing a single word. This was a huge mistake, because at that point he could have written an entire book, or even enough content to fill an entire website like this.