Last week I was reviewing my count of words written to the end of May this year. For a lot of reasons, May was not a good writing month and pulled the annual count down by several thousand words. After the review, I had a long drive - about nine hours to listen to podcasts, and think about that word count and how I can be more consistent in output.
Some of that is making sure I write every day. It's easy to let your focus slip and get sucked into seemingly endless email chains - and let's not even talk about doomscrolling and following a simple internet query through a series of random thoughts and discovering you have just lost thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes? That's five hundred words of manuscript!
Around the time northbound I-75 reached westbound I-10 my memory triggered a metric from John D. MacDonald's biography - The Red Hot Typewriter. MacDonald is best remembered for his Travis McGee books, and if you haven't read them I highly recommend you give them a try. Some of the situations are a little dated but overall the Florida MacDonald describes and McGee rants about could easily be today rather than when the books were written in the 1960's and 1970's.
Anyway, the memory was about the number of words MacDonald wrote when he first began writing after leaving the Army in 1945. I had a number in my head but when I got home and checked the passage in the book, I was off by a considerable amount. In 1945, the pulp magazines were still strong and offered many markets. In the first four months, MacDonald wrote 800,000 words. That's an average of about 6,500 words a day on a manual typewriter. That's one or two short stories a day, or a 50,000 word novel in eight days.
Given that MacDonald started from scratch, I suspect it took a while to build up that daily word count, and quite probably, the daily count at the end was much higher than 6.500 words a day. With everything else I have in my life at the moment, I'm pretty sure 6,500 a day is out of reach, but 1,500 or 2,000 should be something to build up to.
I'm going to use the rest of June to plan and prepare and see how far I can build that daily word count.