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You Don’t Have To Write A Lot To Write A Lot
Consistent effort pays off with cumulative results.
I’ll often see people post on book review sites or forums marveling over an author who churns out multiple novels every year. Popular authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Danielle Steel, and others who are well known for spinning doorstops with apparent ease.
How do these writers do it? It seems impossible.
Some cast doubt that the authors actually wrote their novels on their own. Often they accuse them of using ghostwriters. For sure, some brand name authors, like James Patterson infamously, employ an army of co-writers for their many projects. But many actually do it all by themselves, braving the blank white screen every morning. As David Baldacci says on his X account:
I live to write and write to live.
I recently finished my 11th novel. A book I started on March 23rd of this year — after almost 18 months of false starts — finally completing the first draft on August 27th. That’s a little over five months, or 157 days. The first draft is about 90,700 words.
That comes out to only 577 words a day. Some days I only managed a few hundred. Those were usually the days I worked. Toward the end of the novel, I picked up the pace (as I usually do nearing the…
