There are many different types of writers out there, from poets and songwriters to novelists, and I’m sure each and every one of them will have differing opinions about how many words you should write a day. But if you’re curious about my daily word count as a real professional web writer with bylines everywhere from WIRED to Digital Trends, you’ll find that here.
The ugly answer to this question is between 700 and 4,500 publishable words per day. That’s a wide spread, and we’ll get into why that spread is so large later, and the upper bound may look fairly intimidating if you’re new to writing. It’s also worth noting that I’m only looking at publishable words. Angry Reddit posts and the odd Discord message do not count, in my eyes, as worthy additions to the count.
What Counts
So what do I count?
Words that are getting sent off to a publisher. I’m counting words written for this site, including this article, because I’m publishing them.
I’m not overly pedantic about it, though, even though being pedantic is my signature style. I use whatever word counter is available to me (WordPress and Google Docs often give entirely different word counts for the same post) and I largely just accept words that are involved in formatting as part of the word count unless it’s egregious. Nobody needs to know my word count but me anyhow.
At the same time, I don’t count emails, pitches, questions to the editor, or words I write and later delete (even whole sections) as written words. Those may all be necessities and casualties, but words toward my daily word count they are not.
Next, note that I really just estimate. It isn’t 100% important to me that the count is perfectly accurate, I just like to know as a guideline. Just as a runner is likely to estimate their monthly mileage by adding up each run’s distance to the nearest mile or so, I do the same for my writing, usually to the 100 words level, sometimes to the 50 words level.
Feast and Famine
The highs and lows described above come from a couple of sources. One is the human nature to push hard some days and relax others. That’s not fully the case here. The rest is from the feast and famine cycle of freelance work.
Sometimes you will be in high demand, and others you will wonder if your writing is just a hobby. It can take years to build up a full client list and just minutes to lose one. There will be moments where you have a nearly infinite pool of work to select from when you want to work on it, while there will be others where you’re busy but at the mercy of editors to receive it.
Freelance work is not for everyone and I’ve been incredibly lucky to “make it,” so to speak, in this world.
Start Slow
From the get-go, if you’re a beginning writer “feast” may actually look worse than “famine.” When I successfully pitched my first piece I was incredibly excited right up to the moment where I thought about how many words I was going to have to write. Then things got real and I wondered what sort of a world I’d limped blindly into.
The article, to my recollection, needed to be in excess of 1,500 words. At the time, that was a formidable task, and the article took me weeks to finish.
That’s because I hadn’t yet built up writer’s stamina. It’s a real thing, whether writers talk about it or not. No matter what discipline you’re writing in, I can only advise that you start slow and build that stamina up. Writing doesn’t need to be your full time job on day 1 and it can take several years to get a decent client portfolio together.
But once you get your sea legs, you’ll start to see the amount of words that you can successfully put to the page grows rapidly until it plateaus to a steady, comfortable amount. Even now, I find that my quality starts to decrease somewhere after the 4,000 word mark if I’m not careful and don’t have enough breaks.
What Beginners Get Wrong About Word Count
One of the worst sins beginning freelancers make when it comes to word count is soloing in on it. Much of the online discourse on writing is based on a pay-per-word system and you’ll see pay rates ranging from $0.03 per word to $0.50 per word or even $1 or $2 per word.
This can lead to a very fun exercise. You write out a bad sentence. I am a writer and I am making a lot of money at writing by writing many words. And you do the math. 18 words times whatever money some blog told you that you’d earn. You’ll get absolutely absurd, meaningless figures this way.
What the pay-per-word narrative gets wrong about writing is that not every word is worth the same amount. Quality matters. Furthermore, the pay-per-word system, in and of itself, is never fully in effect these days. Your assignments might have a target, but that’s all. I can only recall one time in my career where I was paid by the word exactly.
Daily word count is important. It’s your capacity, it’s your strength, it’s your output. But it is not the be all, end all measurement of your abilities as a writer. Know your approximate daily word count but don’t go overboard with the calculations.