Wordcounting
23 March 1990, Friday, Glasgow
1,009 words1.
Aiming for 1,000 words a day. That’s a lot.
Young-Toby must have counted those words, one by one. Relieved today that he’d made it past his round number.
I avoid wordcounting now. Instead, I’ll try to write two or three or four full pages — depending on what it is. And if those pages are mostly dialogue, and there’s a lot of white space, fine.
I’m not going to push merely to make a number appear on my screen.
A lot of the #amwriting discourse on Twitter used to be, I’ve hit 2,000 words today - yippee! Perhaps that’s moved to Bluesky and elsewhere. I am not seeing so much of it.
There’s mutual encouragement. There’s healthy competition. And then there’s overproduction.
Some genre writers I know have a target of 10,000 words per week. They need to hit that in order to produce their three books a year. If they don’t write that much, their publishers will be left with a gap in their schedule, and their readers will be without their summer read.
And it’s more than possible that David Foster Wallace had to average something like this, for some of the time, whilst writing Infinite Jest. If he hadn’t, the book would have taken him longer than a lifetime.
But wordcount for wordcount’s sake is likely to make anyone write worse. (As, I must immediately add, will cutting for cutting’s sake.)
If you need to keep up momentum in your writing by living in fear that other writers are outdistancing you, fine.
I understand.
When I was at university, going for a late walk, I’d occasionally hear a typewriter from an open upstairs window. It would make me think They’re writing now and They’re writing better than I am. And I would go back to my room and do an hour or two.
Once I reach Prague, I meet a couple of young men — Will and Iain — who are competitively learning to speak Czech. They push one another on to spend more and more time going through tables of irregular verbs. Occasionally, so they tell young-Toby, one of them rings the other up in the middle of the night, two in the morning, and says only these words — I am doing hard Czech. What are you doing?
And of course, the sleeping one will have to get up and force himself to do an hour of learning. Will and Iain’s progress was extraordinary. Young-Toby watches them disappear into fluency in six to eight months.
Maybe there’s an equivalent for writing. Maybe to get your 10,000 hours and 1,000,000 words done, you need to be obsessed with racking up the digits.
I was.
Could young-Toby have learned faster if he’d written slower?
Perhaps.
Would he have been the same person?
No.
I agree. I never bothered with word count achievements. Hemingway did five hundred words a day. Some days, I might do two hundred words, others, I'll do two thousand. It don't matter. The only reason I know is, the number is at the bottom of the page. I don't aim for anything. I write what I write. I never had a schedule either. Never had a certain time to write, or an amount of time to write. I can write at the crack of dawn, or at midnight and beyond. I often find meself writing after midnight, in the Devil's hours, of the dreamtime. Afternoons, mornings, it's all the same to me. I reckon nighttime is special for me, but anytime'll do. I write when the fever is upon me.
I never get stuck. People say, "Don't wait for inspiration!" but I'm always inspired. To me, saying 99% hard work, 1% inspiration is like saying 99% shell, 1% pearl. But the flames from Heaven strike me daily. Maybe I'm lucky. I got no gate between my conscious and subconscious, so my Demon feeds all the time. But I ain't too fussed if I knock out fifty or a thousand words. The only structure I have is, I tend to write in twenty-minute to half-hour shifts, with a break between the next shift. Twenty-five minutes shift is my best performance. I recently found out that's a thing, can't remember what it's called, an Italian name for it. But for me, I got no choice. I can't work any longer. Half-hour's me lot, and then I malfunction. Need a five, ten-minute rest to go again. And the amount of shifts I do in a row varies. I don't care. As long as I make progress, I don't mind.