There is no right number of words to write a day. The right number is one you can reach on a bad day, because the writers who finish books are mostly the ones who write a little on most days, not a lot on a few. For many people that is somewhere between 250 and 1,000 words.
This guide helps you choose a daily goal, shows what it adds up to, and explains how a streak keeps you going.
What a daily goal adds up to
| Words a day | In a week | In a year | Days to an 80,000-word draft |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 | 1,750 | 91,250 | 320 |
| 500 | 3,500 | 182,500 | 160 |
| 750 | 5,250 | 273,750 | 107 |
| 1,000 | 7,000 | 365,000 | 80 |
| 2,000 | 14,000 | 730,000 | 40 |
250 words is about one double-spaced page. Written every day for a year, it is more than a whole novel. That is the real power of a daily goal: a small number, kept up, beats a large one that is given up in February.
How to choose your number
- Time yourself. Write for 30 minutes on an ordinary day, with nothing else open, and count the words. That is your natural pace.
- Set the goal below it. Choose a number you could reach in half an hour on a tired evening. If 30 minutes gives you 600 words, start at 400.
- Keep it for a month. Change it only once you reach it easily most days. Raising it too soon is the most common way to lose the habit.
- Count words written, not words kept. A first draft is for getting the story down. Editing, cutting and rewriting are real work, but they are a different job, and they get their own time.
Habits that help
- Write at the same time each day. First thing in the morning, the lunch hour, or after the children are in bed. A fixed time takes the decision away.
- Stop in the middle of something. End a session halfway through a scene you know how to finish, and starting the next day is easy.
- Leave the editing for later. Reading back over yesterday's pages is tempting, but it eats the time for today's.
- Make it easy to start. A screen with nothing on it but your words, and the document you were working on open where you left off, removes every excuse.
Why a streak works
A streak is the number of days in a row you have reached your goal. It turns a vague wish to write more into a simple question each day: have I done today's words yet? Few people want to break a long chain of days, and that small pull is often enough on a day when the writing will not come.
Two things keep a streak healthy. Keep the goal small enough to reach on a bad day. And when a streak does break, as it will, start the next one the following morning: your longest streak is still there to beat.
Daily goals and streaks in Retroprose
Every edition of Retroprose has a daily goal and a streak, including the free floppy disk edition.
- Set your goal on your account page, from 0 to 20,000 words. 0 means no goal, and then any day you write counts.
- See today at a glance on the dashboard and the account page: today's words against your goal, your current streak and your longest, the words this week, and a chart of the last 14 days.
- Keep the streak going. Until today counts, the streak runs to yesterday, and the stats say how many more words you need today to keep it.
- Your own days. Days and weeks follow your own time zone, so a late night still counts for the day you were in.
Only the words you type count
A goal is only worth having if the count is honest. Retroprose counts the words you type, and nothing else:
- Pasting does not count, and neither do uploads, Word files you bring in, older versions you restore, Replace, spell check corrections, Undelete or undo.
- Deleting takes words off. A day's words are the words you wrote less the words you deleted that day, so typing and deleting the same sentence never meets a goal.
- Moving text is not deleting. A cut is taken to be a move, so it is not counted against you.
The Writing stats screen
On the Zip disk and hard disk editions Zip disk and hard disk editions, Tools, Writing stats (Alt+F8) opens a screen of your writing over the last 7, 30 or 90 days or the year: words a day, the hours of the day you write, the days of the week, a year of days drawn in blocks, your pace and your busiest documents, all as retro charts.
Private, and yours
Your stats are for you alone. There is no public page of them, no leaderboard and nothing that tells you off for missing a day. You can wipe them from your account page at any time and keep your goal.
A daily goal is separate from a word goal for one document, such as 80,000 for a novel or 1,500 for an essay. You can use both. See How long is a novel? for goals for a whole book.