Progress Report

I wanted to share what’s going to be an on going feature here at Fictive Universe. Every Monday, I’ll be posting on the blog my writing progress report.  I have several writing goals, one of the most important ones is my daily written words target. My daily goal is to write at least 2,000 words per day from Monday-Saturday so that’s at least 12,000 words per week.  Accountability like this will help me keep on track with my writing goals.

Why 2,000 words?

2,000 words with normal spacing and 12-size font is roughly about 5 pages. It’s an achievable goal for a beginner like myself. It’s important to set daily writing goals but it’s also important not to go over board with a daily goal that would be hard to achieve for a newbie writer.

I came up with 2,000 words from Stephen King in his wonderful book “On Writing”. King wrote that for writers starting out they should at least write 2,000 words per day. So that’s what I’m shooting for. I’ve had days where I’ve struggled to get to 2,000 words and days where I blew it out of the water. I don’t do a hard-stop when I get to 2,000 words for the day. If I’m on a roll and I have the time I’ll continue to write.

Setting daily word goals is something most author’s recommend doing for aspiring writers. In an interview with Charlie Rose, John Grisham also said you need to be writing 5-10 pages per day if not you’ll never finish the book. That also corresponds with Stephen King’s 2,000 words per day target. By the way, check out the Charlie Rose interview with John Grisham. Charlie Rose is one of the best interviewers in the business and John Grisham shares a lot of great stories, tips, and suggestions for aspiring fiction writers.

Keeping Track

Keeping track is very easy. If you’re using Microsoft Word or Open Office Writer you can quickly do a word count of your document to give you your progress for the days writing. I use a software called Scrivener for my writing (I highly recommend it). They have a progress bar function where I plug in my word goal and it tracks it for that 24 hour period. Nothing like seeing a progress bar go from red to green to get you going. 🙂

At midnight the counter goes back to zero and I have another 2,000 words to write for that day.

I’ll post my first progress report on Monday July 18th.  I’ll be archiving the reports under the “progress report” sub-category of “writing fiction” category so you can easily find them in one spot.