Write Away

I didn't use word count goals until I was working on a novel rough draft for my senior thesis and realized I was running out of time. I set a goal of a thousand a day at that point, and in retrospect it's amazing to me how often I reached that goal considering everything else I had to do that semester, because I write VERY slowly.

After graduation, my circumstances were less ideal and when I finally quit my job and started writing full time I wanted to set a goal I knew I could meet in my current state of mind, so I went with 500 words, and that worked very well for my first draft. Since writing is my main focus in life right now, I can't just do it when I feel like it, and setting a quantifiable goal makes me stick to it. And like every author seems to say, the more I sit down and crank it out, the easier it generally gets. On slow days I do check it obsessively. It doesn't make it go faster.

But I do divide the story by scenes and work on it by scene. I just don't usually finish a scene in one sitting.

I use overall word count goals to make sure I'm reaching a novel length and gauge at least roughly how far into it I am. My goal for this one was 80k and I actually managed to hit 90k. So far in editing it's come down to 85-86. For scenes I try to keep them at least a thousand words, but that's a totally subjective number.