Knob
Daily word target
You might say: word count goal, writing pace, quota
How many words you write each day. Known paces run from Hemingway’s few hundred words to Trollope’s 250 words every quarter of an hour.
- What it does
- Sets how long the draft takes: 90,000 words at 1,000 a day is three months.
- Ask
- What pace can I keep every day for months?
- Typical
- 500–2,500 words a day
- Trouble
- A big target that you miss, then give up.
Catalogue: Pace
- 500 a day: Hemingway’s recorded days include 450, 575 and 512 words.
- 1,500–2,000 a day: Jack London, 1899: at least 1,500 words, sometimes as high as 2,000.
- 1,667 a day: NaNoWriMo: a 50,000-word draft in 30 days.
- 2,000 a day: Stephen King described writing two thousand words a day.
- 2,500 a day: Trollope trained himself to write 250 words every quarter of an hour, so 2,500 words took about two and a half hours.
Connections
- Raises: Word count
Sources
- Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21 (The Paris Review), 1958 interview / daily writing discussion
He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Daily word target" (daily-word-target) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/fiction-writing/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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