---
title: "Daily Word Count"
date: "2026-10-20"
description: "How many words should you write in a day?"
draft: false
---

Today, I have been thinking about volume. Specifically, the amount of words I should write in a day — my daily word count.

Writing like many other skills, appreciates volume. It also appreciates consistency. The education system with universal testing incentives perfectionist tendencies and training for the exam — playing the game. Many students are lead to write only at the end of an assignment, once they have all the context[^pressure], which is counter to learning skill of writing.

[^pressure]: As well as significant procrastination pressure

My goal at the moment is to build up a backlog of writing as a baseline. Figure out what amount of writing I am capable of each day consistently, and then see what areas I can focus on. The exact amount of words, my daily word count, is not quantifiable at the moment.

My main thought process for daily word count specifically lies with authors of web serials. The authors of many high quality web novels have a prodigious schedule of writing they are capable of. [Actus](https://www.royalroad.com/profile/200905) is a prime example of a writer that maintains quality while have a tremendous output. The shear scale of writing necessitates a streamlined process of writing that doesn't rely on perfection being the central goal of the writing. The quantity and a standard of quality is what matters.

Another analogy that comes to mind is touch typing. The words per minute (WPM) a typist is able to maintain is dependent on the error rate but also the difficulty of the corpus used. A typist typing only the thousand most prevalent words will be much faster than the top ten thousand words, by the mere fact that there is less variation to learn and perform in the top thousand.

Writing feels like it will follow the same, pathway when learning the skill to write more words in a day. The sophistication and ability to be concise is counter to the process of writing more words. This doesn't mean the pursuit of writing more words is invalid — I must be aware of switching focuses every once in a while.

This bimodal focus structure is common in weightlifting. Where weightlifters go through loading and unloading routines in the pursuit of increasing their ability to lift heavy weights while consolidating their gains without injury. In this analogy increasing the volume of words without in would hurt your ability to communicate effectively. With unloading periods being for increasing the quality at a specific word count volume.

I'm excited to see how all these ideas line up in the coming months and years. With the writing I do, I will have some really interesting data to analyse! I hope to share the data in the future.