I routinely write over 50,000 words per week using dictation software. In busy weeks, the number of words I write is closer to 70,000 or even higher. And I've been doing this consistently, writing the equivalent of the Bible every three months, for three years. This is how I do it.
To reach a goal of 50k words in 24 hours you have to write an average of 2084 words each hour. That's a huge amount of output and creative strain to keep up for so long. I never thought I'd struggle with the word count because I type quite fast.
A 50,000 word book (or a book of any length, for that matter) isn't an easy undertaking. It takes countless hours of research, writing, editing, and banging your head against the wall. It has been said that a writer is “someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people,” and I think that rings true.
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.
Anyone can write 40,000 words a week. All you need are the tools to help you get there. Let me help you by sharing some of the tools I use daily to increase my writing output and productivity. I'm a genre-fiction writer and one genre I enjoy writing in is cozy mystery.
The point is you don't have to write 4000 words a day, but if you are trying to reach a goal of more than 10,000 words in a week, there has to be a plan. It does not always mean you need to be a fast writer. It means you need to organise yourself better, and stick to a process. Writing isn't the same as any other task.
Before diving into the specifics of genre-based word counts, let's look at the broader picture of average book length. For most publishers, a book is “novel-length” when it's between 50,000 and 110,000 words.
Writing 40,000 words will take about 16.7 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 33.3 hours for handwriting.
November has 30 days, so in order to write 50,000 words in 30 days, you have to average around 1,667 words a day. Or, if you prefer a weekly goal that's roughly 12,500 words a week. We know, the numbers are scary. But having a plan and a schedule will ease your anxiety and minimize the stress of falling behind.
Writing 7,000 words will take about 2.9 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 5.8 hours for handwriting. However, if the content needs to include in-depth research, links, citations, or graphics such as for a blog article or high school essay, the length can grow to 23.3 hours.
If you're a complete beginner, a 1000 word article should take 3 hours to 4 hours to complete. In general, the rule to follow is: Take the time needed to get everything in order.
The average reader will read 50,000 words in 2.8 hours when reading at a speed of 300 words per minute (wpm). Typical documents that are 50,000 words or more include full-length novels. You may read faster or slower than this depending on your average reading speed.
On 11 January 2007 the author stepped out of Edinburgh's Balmoral hotel having completed the last novel in the Harry Potter series — the culmination of 17 years of writing. But that wasn't all J.K. Rowling wrote while she was there…
Michelle Griep: Authors write a lot of words on many things other than their manuscript, but as for me, once I start a story, I put in a minimum of 4 hours every weekday. Robin Lee Hatcher: I usually write about four hours a day, M-F. That is my time for getting new words on paper.
The average person types approximately 40 words per minute. But as you might expect, I'm not average. Over the past few months, I've managed to increase my writing speed to 245 words per minute. So, it only takes me seven hours to write 100,000 words each day.
Stephen King: 2000 Words
This is not taking into account his non-fiction works and a slew of short stories. In his memoir, King says it's best to write a minimum of 2000 words a day to avoid “the smooch of death.” “Read and write four to six hours a day.
4) Stephen King – 2000 Words
In it, King discusses his writing routine and how he writes around 2000 words (or six full pages) every workday.
He still writes every day, even on the weekends, but as he says, “I used to write more and I used to write faster – it's just aging. It slows you down a little bit.” Earlier on, he used to pump out 2,000 words a day, but these days, he aims to write for about four hours each day and gets down about 1,000 words.
The last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is 157.63% longer than the first book. In total, all seven Harry Potter books contain 1,084,170 words.
A story that is over 40,000 words is generally considered a novel. However, it will be on the short side, as the average length of a novel hovers around 50,000-70,000 words. That said, if your book is around 40,000 words, you're in good company.
In general, the Safe Zone for adult fiction is 70,000-100,000, and the Safe Zone for adult nonfiction is 60,000-90,000 words. Less than that and your book is probably too short.
Writing 20,000 words will take about 8.3 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 16.7 hours for handwriting. However, if the content needs to include in-depth research, links, citations, or graphics such as for a blog article or high school essay, the length can grow to 66.7 hours.
If you can build up to a reasonably fast typing speed, you can generate between 1,500 and 2,000 words an hour on a keyboard. But let's say for the sake of this experiment that you can manage about 1,000 words per hour. You should therefore be able to generate about 30,000 words a week, or 120,000 a month.
Small habits add up, especially daily writing habits. Writing 1,000 words usually gives you enough content to publish a blog post. It's a starting point, but your career can transform when you write at that frequency every day. One thousand words per day add up to 30,000 words per month or 365,000 words per year.