Special Note: This is the 350th post on this Writing Blog
I’ve written a million words this year. I passed the 1 million word mark on October 1 and here’s a picture:
Spreadsheets help you keep track of your word counts and aid you in writing 1 million words in a year
Not too sexy, huh? Well, that’s what sitting in a chair each day and working looks like. I use this spreadsheet and at the end of each day before bed I record the number of words written, which I tabulate by hand on a notepad throughout the day.
Use a notebook to track word counts and get up to one million words in a year
Both the spreadsheet and the notebook are pretty simple, not a lot of bells and whistles, but they work. They motivate me to write. If you wanted to you could zoom in on that spreadsheet and see how many days I missed, but I’ll save you the effort – there are the following gaps:
Those are the 5 days that I didn’t write so far this year, and we’re on the 280th day of the year. What’s more, last year I didn’t get up to 1 million words written until October 22…although I didn’t start up my spreadsheet system until early February of that year.
Folks, I talk about all this in my book Write Now: 20 Simple Strategies for Successful Writing, and you can buy that on Amazon exclusively if you want. Or just browse through the archives of this site.
But you don’t need to. If you want to know how to write a million words in a year all you have to do is sit down and move your hands over the keyboard. Don’t fiddle with notebooks and then rewriting – if you want to write one million words in a year, do it on the computer.
Last year I wrote 1,251,573 words and this year I have a feeling I’ll get up to 1.3 million, but we’ll see.
You can write a million words in a year too if you just work on it each day. To some of you missing 5 days might seem amazing. To me, I don’t even think about that.
And don’t get your knickers in a knot being all impressed, either – I live in poverty and thank God my wife is working now so she can kick in a few hundred for the rent or groceries, because I don’t make much.
Writing a million words a year might get you a lot of visitors on a blog and a lot of books on the shelf, but if it’s not making you any money, what good is it?
I don’t have the answer to that, but this post did just add another 436 words or so to my daily word count.
- May 13;
- May 23;
- May 30;
- September 20;
- October 4.
Those are the 5 days that I didn’t write so far this year, and we’re on the 280th day of the year. What’s more, last year I didn’t get up to 1 million words written until October 22…although I didn’t start up my spreadsheet system until early February of that year.
Folks, I talk about all this in my book Write Now: 20 Simple Strategies for Successful Writing, and you can buy that on Amazon exclusively if you want. Or just browse through the archives of this site.
But you don’t need to. If you want to know how to write a million words in a year all you have to do is sit down and move your hands over the keyboard. Don’t fiddle with notebooks and then rewriting – if you want to write one million words in a year, do it on the computer.
Last year I wrote 1,251,573 words and this year I have a feeling I’ll get up to 1.3 million, but we’ll see.
You can write a million words in a year too if you just work on it each day. To some of you missing 5 days might seem amazing. To me, I don’t even think about that.
And don’t get your knickers in a knot being all impressed, either – I live in poverty and thank God my wife is working now so she can kick in a few hundred for the rent or groceries, because I don’t make much.
Writing a million words a year might get you a lot of visitors on a blog and a lot of books on the shelf, but if it’s not making you any money, what good is it?
I don’t have the answer to that, but this post did just add another 436 words or so to my daily word count.
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