Is Increasing Daily Word Count Important?

If you are an aspiring author or even a professional author now, chances are that you would like to keep improving yourself. I do. I read about many writing articles that tell authors that they should have a minimum daily word count.

This means that everyday or at during the days when an author is typing the contents of their book, they should type a certain amount of words. Many articles and videos online for example like to point out that famous horror author Stephen King has a daily word count of 5,000 words.

Steven King’s daily 5,000 word quota is fairly similar to my daily word count when I’m writing a book. I usually begin typing the words in my book at between seven and eight in the morning. Before lunchtime or by lunchtime, I would have typed already 2,500 words.

After eating lunch, I usually take a short nap and again continue typing. Before five or six in the afternoon, I would have already written an additional 2,500 words. This would make my daily word count at 5,000 words.

You better be acquainted with Stephen King and his writing style and process because I would mention him a couple of times in this article. This is because he is a reference point for many authors.

Not only is he currently the most famous horror author in the world, but he is also one of the most prolific authors around. He not only writes in the horror genre, but also in other genres. He proudly proclaims that he writes ten pages a day.

With his 5,000 word count limit per day, this approximates to about 500 words per page. If you would research online the average word count of a page, it is 500 words for a single spaced outline.

This means that what Stephen King says ties up, he indeed writes 5,000 words per day. In my experience as an author myself, I can vouch that a 5,000 word count per day is a very achievable goal.

He also likes to say that after he has met his daily word count for the day which is usually by noon, just like me, he then takes the rest of the day off to relax. Usually he would just relax at home reading books.

But there is one thing I like to emphasize, we all are not Stephen King. While Stephen King can actually afford to just stop writing and enjoy his millions which many online sources say is now about USD 500 million in 2021, the rest of us don’t have this luxury.

Stephen King likes to say that writing is a hypnotic process. He says that at first, you would find it difficult to write, but after the initial first hard step, you gain traction in your writing process and begin to enjoy it until it becomes the sole thing in your mind.

And this is what Stephen King wants to warn us about. Writing can be so hypnotic that you forget everything else. As you enjoy writing, you might forget to eat, relax and even your loved ones like your family.

He says that writers can become so engrossed in their writing that they could suffer a mental breakdown. This might have to do with overthinking. I have experienced in a small way what Stephen King is talking about.

There have been times when I have been so engrossed with writing that I forgot that it was lunchtime already and that I needed to eat. There are even times when I was still thinking of what to write when I should be sleeping already for the night.

I have learned to relax as I write and think about what to write. If you must know my strategy for not being too engrossed with my writing process, I watch YouTube videos or watch television as I write.

This has enabled me to exceed my daily word count of 5,000 words without being mentally exhausted. There are other authors who are even popular who can write more than 5,000 words a day.

Famed bestselling American Author Michael Crichton can write 10,000 words per day. This is very possible. There was a day when I was able to write 10,000 words although I have not repeated the feat since.

You might say that Michael Crichton is on the extreme side by being able to write 10,000 words a day, but I assure you that this could be normal for you. There have been days when I increase my daily word count to 7,500 words and I plan to increase it in the future to 10,000 words.

Why do I give so much emphasis on continually increasing your word count especially if you are a new author? This is because as a new author, the best way you would actually improve as a writer is to write as much as possible.

Stephen King likes to tell his “steel nail” story. According to Stephen King, when he was still starting out, he received so many rejection letters from the publishers where he submitted his stories to, that he decided to collect these rejection letters and nail it to the wall.

According to him, he received so many rejection letters with the stories he wrote that the steel nail pinning the rejection letters eventually fell down to the floor due to the sheer weight of the rejection letters. What did he do? He got a bigger steel nail to pin his rejection letters.

We may become lucky as authors and become another Stephen King one day. Just remember that he had to write a lot and received a lot of rejection letters before he became one of the most successful authors of all time.

The advice not only of Stephen King but by other successful authors is to write and write as much as you can. As these successful authors like to point out, the few books you have written won’t make you a success. It’s the totality of what you have written.

I could not consider myself yet as an accomplished and professional author. I still consider myself a beginner who still needs to learn a lot about the book publishing industry. But I have read the advice of professional authors to other professional authors.

One thing professional authors advise to other professional authors is not to be complacent with their success and rely only on the success of their previous books. They advise that if an author stops writing, eventually they are forgotten by their readers.

This must be why Stephen King and many other successful authors continue to write. Even though these successful authors are rich and may even be multimillionaires or billionaires like JK Rowling, they still continue to write.

But there is a big difference between struggling or new authors and successful authors, successful authors can afford to stick to their daily word count limits and would probably be still successful.

If you ever are this successful author, I congratulate you and I wish that I could become a successful author like you one day. But for now, as a new and still struggling author, I need to increase my daily word count as much as I can.

Besides a word count, there are authors who instead use a daily time limit for writing. There are authors for example who write for between four to six hours daily irrespective of word count. The time limit may not be so rigid, there are authors for example who only write until lunchtime.

This might be more appealing to you than a daily word count especially if you are a time sensitive person who has a lot of things to do. You might have a regular nine to five job and could only write during the early mornings before work or late at night after work.

But there is a danger to setting a time limit instead of a word count limit when you write. A word count definitely sets a production quota for you while a time limit based writing does not. How is this so?

You might for example set a daily word count of 5,000 words and at the end of the day would have produced 5,000 words just as you have planned. The same can’t be said of a time limited writing goal.

You might have planned to write as much as you can for between four to six hours. But at the end of this time limit, there is no expectation of what you have produced. You might have written between 1 to 10,000 words if we are to follow Michael Crichton.

It is good if you have typed 10,000 words at the end of the time limit, but what about if you continually type only 1 word after the end of each time limit? A time limited writing style does not produce predictable results.

I believe famed Game Of Thrones author George RR Martin suffers from this problem. Many people including his avid fans like to complain how he fails to set a specific time in finishing the latest installments and even the conclusion of his famous GOT novels.

There could be another solution if you really want to be very productive with your writing. Why don’t you do a combination strategy of a daily word count and a minimum time allotment for writing?

You could for example make a goal to write 5,000 words in 6 hours. This is just an example. The numbers are not really important. The important thing here is that you are fully able to measure your production capability when it comes to writing.

If you plan to write a 50,000 word novel, then if we use the example given you would have finished your book within 60 hours. If you write 6 hours per day, then you would have finished your book within 10 days.

If you write 12 hours a day, then it follows that you would have finished your book within 5 days or a normal work week. As you can see, the numbers are not particularly important. The important thing is that anyone can gauge your work schedule and productivity.

This is very important especially if you are a published author. Publishing companies normally set rules for authors to follow like book word count numbers and when the time the book should be finished.

This answer is best answered by Michael Crichton himself. We can conclude fortunately that the story and writing quality of his books are exceptional although he writes an astonishing 10,000 words per day.

I feel I don’t need to tell you about Michael Crichton’s reputation as a bestselling author. I haven’t heard a book he made that didn’t become a bestseller. He might be dead now at just the age of 66, but he is currently known by the current generation as the author of “Jurassic Park.”

I’m definitely sure that almost everyone in the world knows about the movie “Jurassic Park” of which his novel was the basis. Many of his other novels in fact are so well known that they have also been turned to movies.

His novels like “The Andromeda Strain, Prey, Congo, West World” and many others have all been turned to movies or television series. Other more movies and television series were based upon the novels of Michael Crichton.

I would like to emphasize and repeat again that he wrote 10,000 words a day which is an astonishing writing feat. But despite this, the quality of his writing never suffered. Imagine if you could be as prolific as him. You could produce a large body of work even only for a short period time.

As what many authors like Stephen King and most especially Michael Crichton have shown, high word counts which could number to between 5,000 to 10,000 words and possibly more are entirely possible without sacrificing the quality of your writing.

This information is especially important to new and struggling authors who need to continually increase their daily word count. This is because the more you write, the better you become. Also, the more you write, the more you produce. This could mean more sales for you.

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