penfist

stories are the bones of everything

output

1,000 words per day

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It may seem obvious to you that in order to be a successful author, one must actually write. I am dense. It took me 40 years to catch on to this simple truth. When I did, I realized that goals must be set. In my current existence, I work full-time for one of the many corporate entities that make modern life a complete drudgery. Therefore, my daily word count goal is modest; 1,000 words a day is what I demand from myself. I will write 1,000 words per day no matter what. I could have just shit my pants. I may be bleeding from my nose. A gang of midget ninjas may just have snuck in through air vents I didn’t know about, beaten the hell out of me, and stolen all my money. I still have to write 1,000 words per day.

The 1,000 words per day rule is critical. If I don’t follow it, then I never finish a project. Goals are critical, and every writer should have them. Even if you are not a writer, you should have goals. Some examples:

  1. Get laid once a week.
  2. Stay out of jail by avoiding trouble.
  3. Ignore all media coverage of Whitney Houston, and other self-destructive time wasters.
The point of having goals is to ensure that you get things done. People without goals end up watching a lot of Jerry Springer and some of them ending up eating a gun, or 1,000 gallons of ice cream. So then those people are either dead or rolling around the grocery store in a motorized cart, farting a lot and wishing things had turned out different.

Assuming that my first novel is going to be roughly 100K words long, it should take me 100 days to knock out the rough draft. Time to get back to it.

What about you, dear reader? Do you write? If so, what are your goals? How many words a day do you write? What rules keep you on track and focused?