One thing that remains true for every writer is the fact that books get written faster if you write more. That is to say, if you write 2000 words every day, you will finish in half the time as it would take writing 1000 words each day.
The problem for a lot of people is that they can’t even put 1000 words down. Writing 500 words a day takes 4 times as long as writing 2000.
It’s hard to write 2000 words every day. Even when I’m in the middle of a project, I often take 700 words or more to get going. Continuing takes considerable effort.
NaNoWriMo comes out to around 1667 words per day, a pace that is very productive and not really all that difficult to achieve. I won NaNoWriMo in 2009 and I decided I like that pace even though it was a struggle to hit it most days.
For my last novel (A Darkling Nine) I wrote against a daily target of 1750 words, and it wasn’t all that hard to hit most days. What changed for me?
I wrote Rigel Kentaurus with a daily target of 1000 words per day. I wrote Fishpunk with a daily target of 1500 words per day. And, i wrote A Darkling Nine with a target of 1750 per day. I ratcheted up. The next novel will be at 2000 per day, a figure I surpassed multiple times during the last novel.
So it’s training, plain and simple. Train yourself to take on the additional word count with each new project until you reach the target you want. It worked for me, maybe it will work for you, too.
