The Part-Time Writer’s Guide to 25,000 Words per Week
By: Mortdecai Jones
Tags: Lifehacks, Writing, Efficiency, Productivity, Discipline

The Part-Time Writer’s Guide to 25,000 Words per Week

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

A few years back, I picked up a ghostwriting gig as a side hustle.

The ask was for two to three fiction pieces per week, at around 10,000 words per piece. In order to get the work done, I had to write at a rate of up to 2,000 words per hour, for two to three hours every single day.

In retrospect, I should have found a way to claim my energy drink budget as a business expense during this time. The pace was grueling, and I leaned heavily on those over-caffeinated sugar bombs to keep me working well into the dead of night to complete my assignments.

But although the excessive caffeine helped — as did the pressure from the upcoming expenses of a second child on the way — there were also a handful of mindset shifts and tactical habits I employed to keep myself writing at such a furious pace.

1. Writing comes first

My daily writing time began around ten or eleven each night, right after my wife went to bed. However, as an avid gamer and a well-practiced procrastinator, my natural instincts were to distract myself instead of tackling the task at hand.

But as completed assignments failed to materialize night after night, I realized that I had to make a change in how I operated. I had to stop tricking myself into thinking that I could “destress with a snack and Netflix before starting” or that I would “work through writer’s block by playing a game for thirty minutes before ‘getting back to it’.”

So I made a new rule for myself. Every night, after my wife went to sleep, I had to immediately go to my computer, sit down, open up Word, and put both hands on the keyboard.

No late night snacks. No Netflix. And no gaming.

There was writing to be done.

It was both the hardest and the easiest change to make. Having a full-time job, a pregnant wife, and a firstborn child to help take care of left very little “me” time in the day. So to spend it at what amounted to a second job rather than relaxing and gaming…stung a bit.

On the other hand, the act of just sitting at a computer and opening up Word was a pretty low bar as far as difficulty goes.

Clearing that low bar, however, immediately led to success. By prioritizing writing over leisure and comfort, I was able to hit my daily word quotas and meet my assignments with time to spare. And honestly, the satisfaction I got from actually creating something far outweighed the slight wistfulness I felt from seeing digital cobwebs grow on my ever-expanding game library.

Outside of my responsibilities to my family and my workplace, writing came first. It had to. Otherwise, nothing would have gotten done.

2. Know the path

There’s an ongoing discussion in writing communities as to whether one is an architect — someone who fully plans out their stories before they put a single word on the page — or a gardener — someone who writes based on their in-the-moment intuition.

It’s possible to be a high-output writer as either of these archetypes. However, I see the high-output gardener as someone who requires a stroke of inspiration in order to produce a large volume of words — and that sort of inspiration is very difficult to consistently capture.

It’s much easier to be a high-output architect instead.

For instance, for each of my ghostwritten pieces, I had a series of plot, character, and aesthetic beats that I knew I needed to hit. Because of this, I never really dealt with writer’s block. I always knew where my characters were coming from and where they were going — and this worked very well to keep the words flowing.

You don’t need a formalized, written outline to do this. Personally, I would spend the idle moments in my daily commute setting those beats down in my head. But whether you’re working from an elaborate series of nested numbers, letters, and Roman numerals, or if you’re working from a few notes you scrawled down while sipping your morning coffee, it’s a lot easier to write quickly if you already know what path you’re going to take.

3. Leave beauty to the editing

I think of writing and editing as a collaboration between a stonecutter and a sculptor.

The stonecutter’s job is to provide the sculptor with raw material — a huge chunk of marble — and the sculptor’s job is to turn that marble into something beautiful.

You need the writer in you to produce raw material — words — that the editor in you can shape into something worth reading. When you’re in writing-mode, don’t waste your time trying to find the perfect word or phrase. Writing quickly does not require writing perfectly. Put down something that’s close enough to what you mean and move on.

Leave the sculpting to your editing self once your lexical marble has been fully delivered.

4. Use deliberate practice to write faster

I was always the student who wrote his school essays at the last possible minute. Suddenly — and as if by magic — the words that had eluded me for weeks somehow found their way to the page once there were eight or fewer hours remaining before the deadline.

I found myself thinking about this phenomenon often at the start of my ghostwriting period. How could I replicate that sense of urgency I had in high-school and early college in order to pull more words-per-minute out of myself?

Ultimately, I would create a clumsy Word macro to help me with this. But my initial pass at a low-tech solution ended up being pretty instrumental in getting me to where I needed to be:

Get a timer and make it visible. An egg-timer, an alarm clock, a wristwatch, a phone — something that you can quickly look at while writing to see how much time you have left in a session. Learn how to quickly check your wordcount. For reference — in Word, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-G. In Google Docs, it’s Ctrl-Shift-C. Add 250 to your current wordcount and write the new number down in a place where you can see it. Set your timer for fifteen minutes and start writing. Periodically check your current wordcount against your target wordcount to see how close you are to hitting your goal. Use the pressure of time against your goal to push you towards greater output. If you are able to meet your goal three times in a row, increase the difficulty by 25 words. If you fail to meet your goal three times in a row, decrease the difficulty by 25 words.

The goal, over time, is to get to 500 words per 15 minutes, which yields an astounding 2,000 words per hour. Writing two hours a day at 2,000 words per hour will yield 28,000 words a week. At that rate, you could win NaNoWriMo (50,000 words) in two weeks — and write an almost 400 page book in a month.

This might sound impossible. However, this process — which I designed using the principles of deliberate practice — quadrupled my writing speed over a period of several weeks. At some point, you will become so skilled at quickly generating words that your only limit will be how fast you can type — which is something you may then need to practice as well.

5. Be patient

Do not expect to go from 200 words per day to 4,000 just like that. Writing is no different than any other skill, despite our cultural romanticizing of it. It requires sustained daily practice, specific and actionable goals to measure yourself against, patience, and dedication. This path to increased words per day is a marathon, not a sprint — but if you put in the right kind of effort and employ the right strategies, you can take your output to levels you never before thought were possible.