A full-time author’s job is to write. For many of them, they spend a full-time job’s amount of time writing, editing, promoting, and doing many other things for their books. But many authors write only part-time, as they often have a non-writing job. But they tend to have their own routine, or some just do it whenever they can. How about our authors?
Question 72 – Do you have a daily or weekly target for writing? What is it, and how do you achieve it?
S. R. Carrillo
For the past 2 or 3 years, I have made monthly goals of writing, at a minimum, 10,000 words on any given project. It’s a realistic goal for me – especially since I was playing G.I. Joe when I made it.
As for how I make it happen – I simply make it a priority. I finish a scene, start a new one, outline an idea for further down the line, edit some lines that were bothering me, all until I meet my goal. If I don’t, I work harder at it. If I do, I keep going. ^_^
Elizabeth Rhodes
It’s been so long since I was actually writing a new story (I’ve spend most of my time editing and then releasing/promoting Jasper) that I haven’t yet established a habit. In a perfect world I’d be writing a thousand words a day, but that’s definitely not happening right now. I don’t hold myself to that goal, but I plan to get a chapter down per week at minimum.
H. Anthe Davis
Normally I have a target of 2-3 pages per writing day, and I write five days a week. I write before I go to my Day Job, so 2-3 is about the amount of writing I can squeeze in between gaining full consciousness and being forced to run out the door. There are two writing-days where I don’t have the Day Job hanging over me, so sometimes I get 4-6 pages in, and there are always outlier days where I get up to 8 because I feel very motivated. My main goal is to get -something- down on the page, and keep pushing at it until I have to break off for the day. It’s just persistence — and a steady schedule I guess, because my Day Job schedule was wacky for most of February and totally threw me off my writing game. Hopefully by the time this posts, I will have gotten back into the proper swing of it.
Eric Wood
I don’t really have a target. Though I do try to write daily posts for my blog. I attempt to write at least 500 words per post. Sometime they’re longer. Sometimes they’re much longer. Sometimes I fall short. I certainly don’t beat myself up over it. If I succeed great. If not, I’ll try again tomorrow.
Tracey Lynn Tobin
I definitely should have a daily or weekly target, for motivation purposes if nothing else, but I don’t because it would only set me up for disaster. That may sound a little jaded, but since my day job requires me to work 12-hour days for 14 days straight, there are often periods of days at a time during which I simply cannot write unless I’m willing to give up even more sleep than I already lose while on shift, so trying to hold myself to some kind of target just doesn’t do me any favors at all. I mainly just look at my monthly totals and then try my hardest to beat that total the following month.
Jean Davis
Ideally, I aim to write a thousand words a day if I’m working on a novel. Some days life happens and I don’t write at all. Other days I get two thousand words in. It seems to level out. When I’m in short story mode, I aim for half of that because there’s a lot more thought involved to be concise when transferring the story in my head onto the page.
D. T. Nova
Not a very specific one. I’ve gone through periods where I had the goal of always wanting to get something substantial done every day, but allowed enough flexibility that it achieving wasn’t an issue. Unfortunately, I’ve been having trouble with it recently due to personal reasons that have nothing to do with writing.
Linda G. Hill
My daily target is to write something. Anything. Even if it’s a sentence. I achieve my goal (sometimes, not always) by tying up my son, gagging him, and then ignoring an hour’s worth of pleas to be let loose. … yes, I’m joking. I just ignore him for two minutes. It’s about all he can take. 😉 But seriously, I’d love to spend hours every day working on a novel. The only time I seem to manage that is when I put my nose to the grindstone for NaNoWriMo.
Allen Tiffany
No. I push relentlessly on writing and marketing my work, as well as learning about such things, but I have no word count goal. And I don’t think such things are conducive to good writing (just my opinion). I much rather mull things over, add, delete, rewrite, rewrite and rewrite. I have great confidence that problems with my story, the plot, a character’s motivation, etc., will eventually resolves themselves (often in something of an epiphany) if I give it enough time and thought.
Gregory S. Close
When I was writing full time I would set goals – usually tied to scenes rather than word count. Now, I’m just happy to get writing time in at all.
If I can return myself to a routine, then writing first thing in the morning yields the best results, leaving time to edit the prior day’s work in the afternoon or evening. Getting something in every day (or at least 5 working days a week) is really key to establishing a good rhythm.
Paul B. Spence
Not really. When the mood strikes me/life gets out of the way/stress decreases, I tend to write a few thousand words a day. If you average it out, even on days I don’t write, I ‘write” a thousand or so.
Jay Dee Archer
I’m in a unique situation right now, so I don’t have any targets at all. Since I’m moving half way around the world, I can’t concentrate on writing. However, after the move, and once we’ve gotten everything settled, I can finally get myself into a writing routine. Ideally, I’d like to write at least five days a week and achieve a minimum of somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words. More is fine. But I can’t really say until I’m able to write, and see where I feel comfortable. With so many unknowns, I can’t really answer this very well.
How about you?
If you’re an author, what kind of target have you set for yourself? Let us know in the comments below.
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