How many words should you write a day?
It's something writers of all types struggle with: whether to set yourself a daily target or just let nature take its course. Here's what the professionals do
Who is the most successful novelist of all time? Charles Dickens? J K Rowling? Stephen King?
Or how about Sir Walter Scott?
There are various ways you can measure ‘success’. Let’s take some criteria. They outsell everyone else in their lifetime. The fame of their novels spreads far beyond their home country. And most of all, their depiction of that country starts a tourism boom that has never really ended – they invent the nation as a ‘brand’.
By those measures, there is only one candidate: Scott. In this, the 250th anniversary of his birth, there will be huge interest in the writer who put Scotland on the map. All the things we associate with Brand Scotland today – kilts, bagpipes, wild scenery, songs and ballads, in some way trace their origin back to Scott’s stories and poems. And when George IV visited Scotland in August 1822, it was Scott who choreographed the show, creating a Scottish iconography that may not have been authentic – but has certainly endured.
There is just one problem with the case for naming Scott the most successful novelist of all time: hardly anyone reads his novels these days.
I’ve recently finished Scott’s Rob Roy, one of his most celebrated works. Frankly, it was a bit of a chore. You can’t help but agree with Matthew Parris, host of the BBC’s Great Lives programme, when he confessed to having given up on another great Scott novel: Waverley. It was, he said, just too turgid and verbose for modern consumption.
The man proposing Scott as a fit subject for that series, the Scottish travel writer, academic and politician Rory Stewart, was forced to agree that, wonderful as Scott is in many ways, his prose style is not.
And Stewart had an interesting explanation for that.
Scott, quite simply, wrote too much. He would routinely manage 6-7000 words a day, alongside his duties as a sheriff, planting thousands of trees and being a sturdy pillar of the Scottish establishment. Scott became hugely rich, then went spectacularly bankrupt. So loved and admired was he by his friends and readers that they were willing to bail him out. He refused all offers of help. Instead, he did what he always did. He wrote.
How many words? Graham Greene – a pretty prolific writer himself, let’s not forget – recommended no more than 500 words a day for the serious novelist [see list of writer’s outputs, below]. I’m a pretty busy journalist, as well as working on two books, a screenplay and two blogs, including this one. I’d be pretty surprised if I managed more than 6,000 words a week. But Scott? Up to 40,00 words a week. It hardly bears thinking about.
Mind or muscle?
A century after Scott, another Scottish writer, Arthur Conan-Doyle, became his generation’s star novelist. He was Scott-ish too in his output, although his 3,000 words a day seems puny by comparison.
There’s a keen portrait of Conan-Doyle in Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George. Barnes portrays Arthur as a writer who approaches writing like a professional sportsman. And there probably has never been a keener writer-sportsman than Conan-Doyle: he was a boxer, rower, golfer, archer and cyclist. He popularised skiing, took up baseball after a trip to the States in 1914 and played in goal for what is now Portsmouth Football Club. Barnes writes about Arthur building up his ‘writing muscles’. Literary work, in the budding author’s head, requires exercise and discipline if you are to compete properly.
It’s maybe not an analogy that will appeal to every writer; but it does to me. I’ve had periods in my career where I’m writing smoothly, continually, productively – and others when I am spending most of my time editing or managing or doing marketing bollocks. When I sit down to write a piece at those times, the writing muscles feel cramped and flabby. I have to keep taking frequent rests to get my breath back. There's no flow, or confidence.
But good sports people know that performance is at least 50% mental. You break through barriers – you carry on when your brain is pleading with you to stop. And when your touch deserts you, when you just feel off-form – you carry on, knowing that the rhythm, the confidence, the touch will come back eventually. And when it does, it’s the best feeling in the world.
Want to be a productive writer?
When we set up Forthwrite, we decided we needed to address not just the standard of writing within organisations and their writing culture, but how productive they are. We know from personal experience how tough people can find it to be a productive writer in a corporate environment. Time and time again we hear these things:
There are too many distractions in the office – I find it hard to write there
Writing at home is easier, but not as easy as I’d hoped
We write by committee – and that’s frustrating
It’s not clear on our team who’s the writer, who’s the editor and who gets sign-off
We waste thousands of hours a year on long and unclear emails, slack messages and endless PowerPoint decks.
So we have coaching sessions specifically about productivity and workflow. We might not turn you into Sir Walter Scott or Stephen King. But we’ll help build up those writing muscles and get the words flowing properly within your outfit.
To end – the word counts of famous writers
I came across this excellent writing blog where they’ve looked at the output of 19 living and dead authors.
Michael Crichton is top, weighing in at 10,000 words a day. I find this about as likely as, well, Jurassic Park.