It’s time I started to focus on increasing my daily word count average. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, something I’ve been writing about here, off and on, for more than a year. (That link goes to all the posts I tagged with the relevant tag. They started back in April 2014.)
Two things I’ll need to do to increase my daily word count average—
- increase my writing speed
- improve my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction
Despite the popular notion that all it takes to write faster is to spend more time writing, those are two distinctly different things as far as I’m concerned. There’s writing more and there’s writing faster. Writing faster means increasing my speed, and my writing speed is how many words I write during a specific unit of time. Increasing the amount of time I spend writing doesn’t change my speed.
I’ve realized over the last few months that even though I say I’ve given up on the idea of writing faster in favor of writing more, that’s not exactly true. I do want to write faster, because there are just so many stories I want to write, and I want to have written them already! It’s unfortunate that I can’t go back in time and make that happen. ;) The next best thing is to get them written as fast as I can.
As for improving my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction, I’m still working on it. Right now, with the success I’m having with the schedule, I’m definitely writing more on the days when I stick to it. So to accomplish item #2 on the list, I’ll just keep pushing myself to stick as close to my schedule as possible. Six hours of writing each day is enough. Anything over five hours of actual writing is going to make me happy.
That leaves me with trying to figure out how I can increase my writing speed. For the next few weeks at least, I’m going to be recording my efforts to do just that.