Simple. Puking 5k words on your computer isn't hard. Anyone can do it, writing 5k coherent words is much harder. Quality over quantity.

Also, it's mostly about how different people write. Some write quickly and don't think about it too much. Others (as specified several times in this thread) take their time to plot out every single thing and constantly go back and forth to make sure it's as they imagined it before going forward. That doesn't make them lesser writers. Probably the opposite. Slower, but with more solid results.

Writing many thousand words quickly isn't difficult for anyone. Not making them shit is the hard part.

 

Consistency is key.

Writing every day, setting aside some time for the words. Fanfiction taught me that, long before I broke into the original published world. I monitor my writing time and words down to the minute. Here's my September data:




Total Words for September: 117,184

Average Daily Words: 3906

It would've been higher, but I spent the last week of September sauntering around Basque country - I still wrote, but only a few hours a day. And, as can be seen, after that little break my words shot up to 6-7k territory again. Spent a few days in Spain sharpening the old axe.

Not too bad, pretty good even, and better than aiming for 10k word sprint that burns me out. Too much in a day and I won't go back to it for a few days, harming my overall progress.

10k words a day is great, but if you then don't write for a month... your average is an ugly 333 words a day. Not so pretty.

I'm a full-time writer these days, with consultancy work on the side, so I treat it like a job. 8 hours a day, including dickin' around time on DLP and such. But for the last ten years I wrote, rather successfully, around working absurd shift hours and a lot of travel for my job. It's all about carving out writing time and defending it.

Like, I just completed my fortnightly grocery shopping. It took ten minutes and I didn't even leave the house. I used online delivery from one of the big supermarkets. I pay £2 for the delivery, but it'll arrive today (if ordered early enough) and save me probably an hour. An hour's writing time is worth £2 to me. That £2 is probably money I would have spent and more on junk at the grocery store anyway - dazzled by their advertisements and sweet candy.

Little tricks like that, free up the hours.

 

I absolutely love reading about the process of other writers and how they design their schedules (if they keep a schedule at all). It's always great to compare and see what they do differently and then maybe trying it out for myself.

Just for the sake of completion: click me

That's how I kept the schedule while I wrote the sequel to T7A. I found that having to write down your progress (thus making it more real and easier to view) helps a tremendous amount.

As a non-native speaker, 1-2k feels a good amount to keep up a certain level of quality. Of course I'm doubly happy when I get a day with 4-5k, but those are pretty rare so I enjoy them when they come but don't actively try to force myself into writing them.

Through writing regularly I also found out two things about my own writing process:

#1 The good stuff happens in the morning for me. That's where I get most of my ideas and paragraphs that I really like.

#2 Despite writing sometimes feeling like shoveling shit from a sitting position (to take a Stephen King quote), after a few months everything becomes relative. I can see one passage as total crap while writing it (and despairing while doing so), but later during the editing stages I look at it far more objectively. Often times the feeling of "I'm so bad at this" depends on so many other factors that it doesn't relate to what I wrote at all.

 

The arsiest arse you've ever seen, an arseness that's never been equaled.