How to write only 90 words per hour—a primer

Start with a goal. Know that you really need to make this day’s writing count.

Goals 500 750
Session Words WPH
1 57 86
2 138 207
3 -72 -108
4 118 177

Add in rewriting, then delete a few paragraphs that really don’t sound like they belong, add in some perfectionism—okay a lot of perfectionism, and throw in a dash of what-the-fuck, and there you go!

My average words per hour over 2.667 hours: 90.

At least I have a few sessions to go so maybe today won’t be a total loss. :o

Six sessions might be the magic number

I’m doing 40 minute sessions today, that means six sessions, which feels like a Goldilocks number: not too many, not too few.

In fact, I did two 40 minute sessions this morning and both of them felt like they went by so fast that I couldn’t believe either of them was over when the timer dinged.

I definitely feel like I needed to leave myself more time to get into the zone and extending my session length to 40 minutes seems to have helped. I might even go longer now that I’m seeing the benefit. Now that I’m not drinking coffee and teas all the time while I’m writing, I’m handling the longer sessions just fine.

The only thing is that my word count per hour doesn’t benefit that much from the longer sessions.

In the past, there’s even been a negative effect. Shorter sessions definitely give me a better wph. On the other hand, I do think I enjoy writing better with the longer sessions. And since I need to like writing again more than I need an awesome wph, I think I’m just going to enjoy the trade-off.

July’s average words per day (not counting today because I’m still writing) = 838 words