10,000 Words a Day

I’ve always been inspired by this article.

… here’s the story of how I went from writing 500 words an hour to over 1500, and (hopefully) how you can too:

A quick note: There are many fine, successful writers out there who equate writing quickly with being a hack. I firmly disagree. My methods remove the dross, the time spent tooling around lost in your daily writing, not the time spent making plot decisions or word choices. This is not a choice between ruminating on art or churning out the novels for gross commercialism (though I happen to like commercial novels), it’s about not wasting your time for whatever sort of novels you want to write.

Drastically increasing your words per day is actually pretty easy, all it takes is a shift in perspective and the ability to be honest with yourself (which is the hardest part). Because I’m a giant nerd, I ended up creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Any one of these can noticeably boost your daily output, but all three together can turn you into a word machine. I never start writing these days unless I can hit all three.

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This is tremendous advice.

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I like it too! It’s inspiring to imagine writing like that.

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Great post, thanks! Achievable goal for me today: from approx 400 words to 800.

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That is a great goal!

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I like the idea of a triangle, equally weighting and requiring knowledge, time and enthusiasm. I think that sometimes when we suffer from writers’ block, it may be because one or more of these three are out of balance with the others. Instead of trying to force ourselves to write under those conditions (unsuccessfully for the most part), perhaps we should self-assess, then address the imbalance once identified.

Thank you for sharing your personal revelation in this regard.

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This is such a great article. I have a limited amount of time that I write each day, and it would be helpful to get more words written in the time that I have.

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I remember reading this article a while ago and, if I’m not mistaken, I pinned it to one of my Pinterest boards to refer back to. It’s great advice, in theory, but I’m not sure how effective it would be for me. I have OCD which, when it comes to my writing, borders on perfectionism. That makes for an uphill struggle in relation to daily word output.

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I bought Rachel’s book ‘2k to 10k - Writing Faster, Writing Better’, on Kindle via Amazon.

Daniel, I think I juxtaposed the phrases ‘Writing Faster, Writing Better’ in the forum about books we should read.

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Fantastic — I just bought it, too, for my Kobo reader.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/2k-to-10k-writing-faster-writing-better-and-writing-more-of-what-you-love-1

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I’m reading this book now. It’s fun!

Her comments about “getting excited” are surprisingly… on point.

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