How many words should you write in a day or week?

The tricky part is that there is no right answer to this question. Obviously, you want to write as many words as possible, because the more you write each day the sooner you will reach the end of your novel. That being said, your goals should be realistic for you.

First of all, you need to decide how many days a week you’re going to be writing. If you’re participating in a writing sprint (like National Novel Writing Month), you may be able to commit to writing for 6 days a week. However, most people will be too busy to sit down almost every day and write.

Start small

The great thing is that you can adjust your goals. In order to set yourself up for success, you may want to start small. Commit to working on your novel for 2 or 3 days per week (unless writing is your full-time job). If you find that you can easily add another day of writing, then you should do it. But if you start out trying to write 5 days each week and then find that you can only manage 3, you’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment. And feeling like you’re doing enough might lead you to stop writing altogether. Obviously, we want to avoid that.

3 Steps to setting a daily goal

1. Set your overall word count goal

Let’s take a look at your word count goals. It’s a good idea to have a word count goal, especially in the beginning. In order to come up with a good daily goal, you need an overall word count goal first. For example, you may want to write a book that has about 70,000 words.

2. Pick a deadline

Next, you have to pick a deadline. Yes, you want to have an end in sight. When do you want this novel done by? Of course we’re just talking about the first draft, but you still want to have a deadline for it. If you want the first draft done in 6 months from now, that gives you about 26 weeks to write.

3. Calculate your daily or weekly writing goal

This means you have to write about 2,692 words every week. If you can write for 5 days each week, you only have to type 538 words each day you’re writing. Whether you want to aim for your daily goal or your weekly goal is merely a matter of preference. It might be too intimidating to write 1,000 words every day if you can only write for 2 or 3 days each week. It’s certainly doable, but you may need to trick yourself by working on your weekly goal instead.

Don’t expect it to be easy

As you’re getting started writing, you will get a feel for how much you can write each day. It partly depends on how much time you have to write and whether or not you can do so without distractions. If you feel that the goal you sit is just unachievable, then you may have to adjust it a little.

But don’t forget, it’s not supposed to be easy. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Plus, on some days you’ll greatly exceed your daily goal because you will be on a roll and unable to stop. During those times, you might not even notice when everyone else is evacuating the town because a hurricane is coming….