Writing a Million Words a Year

I was reading a story recently about a writer, who already had two traditionally published novels, when she had a baby. She also had a full-time job. He husband, in his infinite wisdom, decided that writing, working, and family obligations were too much for her, so for the time being he said she should stop writing, and instead spend her time at home spending time with him and their new daughter.

Stop writing? What a dangerous thing to say to a writer.

Fast forward a year later, and she tells him that she's just had her latest book accepted by her publisher.

It turns out, she'd been using her lunch hour at work to write her novel.

Her husband was furious and accused her of being unfaithful. They had a huge fight about it and she was upset because he still wasn't speaking to her.

I thought, wow. This woman has a full-time job and is clearly a good mother and wife, yet her husband is angry at what she does at lunch time at work.

Writing during lunch at work is also how J K Rowling wrote her second Harry Potter book. Her first one was written when she was an unemployed single parent (which she hated) so she got a job once her first book was published and started her second. She wrote so much at work that one of her female colleagues eventually asked her if she was having an affair because she always turned down 'lunch with the girls'.

What all this goes to demonstrate is how easy it is to write a book if your determined to do so. And the important word here is DETERMINED. Just one hour a day helped these writers produce best-selling novels.

This year I plan to have my best writing year ever and write a book a month. So far I'm on track. I'm actually ahead of schedule.

I'm also currently reading a book about pulp fiction writers who used to be only paid by word count so they had to write a lot in order to earn a living.

They used average a million words a year. Some even wrote one and a half million words a year.

So I worked it out (with the help of my trusty calculator). 

To write a million words a year, if you wrote for 5 days a week, you'd need to write 3,800 words a day. 

Even if you only wrote during your lunch hour on week days, at 1,000 words an hour, you could still write 261,000 words a year (261 working days a  year).

So if you want to up your game (and it's certainly got my interest) to a million words a year, you need to write 3,800 words a day, 5 days a week.

Or if you want to write every day, it's a mere 2,700 words a day.

How about it?

What's your average daily word count?

If you don't know, try writing as much as you can in one week, and then divide it by 7. 

That will give you your daily average.

Then try and beat it every week.

Start today.