Finally Hit 60,000+ Words In a Month

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Written by Kodi Wolf at 1:41 AM

January was an awesome writing month. I finally topped 60,000 words in a single month. I tried to do this back in September after hitting 57,791 words in August, but it didn't happen. I wasn't actually planning to do it this time either, but when I hit day 5 and realized I was at 10,000 words (meaning I was averaging 2,000 words a day), I decided I didn't want to waste the opportunity to go for it.

My total word count for January was 65,688, which averages out to 2,119 words per day. My lowest words per day was 446 and my highest was 5,508.

What's really cool is that most of those words were actual story text (about 51,000 or 78%) as opposed to brainstorming sessions, which is one of the ways I can increase my word count in a shorter amount of time. Don't get me wrong, though. Brainstorming sessions aren't padding. I'm working and being creative in those sessions. I'm just not spending time struggling to find the right word or the best way to describe something. That's why it's possible for me to hit 2,000 words in as little as an hour while the same number of words of story text can take me as much as 4 or 5 hours to complete.

All in all, I think this was a pretty cool way to start out the year. Not that I'm going to be doing this again anytime soon. I really had to buckle down to hit my word count, which took time away from Corene and neither of us liked that. I much prefer being able to knock off after a few hundred words over the weekend or in the evenings in order to spend time with my wife and catch up later while she's at work or asleep, but with my daily goal being 2,000 words, that just wasn't an option.

I think I'll be a lot happier staying around the 15,000-30,000 mark. That's still about a novel's worth of words every three months, which is pretty good in my opinion. For February, that works out to about 536 to 1,071 words per day.

Guess I should get to work on that. :)