How to Set a Daily Word Count Goal That Works
By Greer Macallister | February 13, 2025 |
Unfortunately, in word count as in life, there is no magic number. This applies both to the overall number of words in your manuscript (How many does it take? Enough to tell the story) and the daily word count goal you may want to set for yourself during the drafting phase. While some writers do just fine with “write as much as you can,” I’ve found over the years that I, personally, benefit from setting a more specific goal.
Want to see if a daily word count goal works for you? Here are three ways you might go about setting your personal number. One of these might resonate more than the others. Or it’s possible that your own best strategy may vary between these options – what works often depends on what type of story you’re writing, what stage you’re at in the process, what else is going on in your life, and much, much more.
High and ambitious. This is the type of goal many writers experience for the first time in a NaNoWriMo-type setting, trying to slam down a sloppy first draft in a specific amount of time at any cost. As you well know if you’ve done NaNo, it takes 1667 words each day to write 50,000 words in a month. For most writers with social lives and/or families and/or day jobs, this is a pretty brisk pace. But if you find you work really well under pressure, even self-induced pressure, a daily word count goal of 2000 or 3000 or even 5000 words might give you the kick in the pants you need to put big numbers on the board. Or there’s…
Modest and achievable. You’ve heard that slow and steady wins the race, and this is definitely another method with high potential for some writers. If you just want to chip away at the draft in bite-size chunks, a modest goal (often 500 words a day) enables you to feel that sense of achievement and forward motion without burning yourself out. Did you know that if you write 500 words a day, you can have an 80,000-word draft in under six months? That’s pretty fast, all things considered. Or you can try…
Schedule-driven. Whether you have a delivery date set by your agent or publisher or you just want to get through a draft for your own reasons, the third way to set a goal involves more math. Are you 30,000 words into a novel that you’ve already completely planned but you feel like you’re stalling out on the actual writing? You can get to 90,000 words in just one month, but you’re going to need to aim for 2000 words a day. Only 10,000 words into a planned 100,000-word novel you’re writing from an approved proposal and you’ve figured out that you need to get it to your agent in three months in order to make your publisher’s deadline in five? 30,000 words a month is 1000 words a day if you write every day, or if you’re only writing on weekdays, that’ll be about 1500 per. Look at the numbers, work backwards, do the math. Simple! (Much simpler to set the goal than to achieve it, of course, but the hardest part of writing has always been… writing.)
One more word about all of these methods: again, it’s quite personal, but I like to set these daily goals primarily for pace reasons. If I’m working with a 2000-word-per-day goal but on Tuesday I only get 1000 written, I might rejigger things to aim for 2500 on both Wednesday and Thursday. Other writers I know have a daily goal only on weekdays, and if they miss those numbers, they’ll add writing sessions on the weekdays to keep making progress. There are a thousand different ways to succeed. You’ll only know which one works for you by trying.
Q: Do you set a daily word count goal when you’re drafting a novel? Does one of these methods resonate with you?
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. Her latest novel, The Thirteenth Husband, is inspired by Aimee Crocker, the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age. Macallister also writes the ongoing Five Queendoms epic fantasy series as G.R. Macallister. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston, MA. www.greermacallister.com
Before, I used to have word count goals on a daily basis. Now, my writing goal is time-based. Getting two hours of writing on weekdays is a success to me 🌻
The main thing, and I seldom pull it off cleanly, is to put your butt in the chair and turn off the internet. I did learn one thing from doing nanowrimo: You get an amazing pile of work. Some things, you can barely remember writing. On the other hand, you’ll probably have to throw a third of it away. I still got a book out of it eventually.