The Daily Word Counts Of 17 Famous Authors

For anyone who’s ever wondered, "am I writing enough," these word counts remind us that there’s more than one way to build a book.

How many words should a writer produce on an average day? Well, to get a rough idea, let’s take a look at how many words some successful authors throughout history tend to produce per day.

If you’re Graham Greene, you’re stopping at precisely the moment when you hit 500 words. On the other hand, if you’re Margaret Atwood, you’re trying to aim for 1,000 to 2,000 words a day. The truth is, all of this depends

A lot of authors don’t even have daily word targets, so don’t feel like you have to. Some prefer sitting at their desk for a certain number of hours. I see the logic in this – if you aim for a certain word count, sometimes you’ll be tempted to just crank out rubbish to hit your quota. Then there’s the Neil Gaiman approach, where you simply sit at your desk for a set number of hours and can’t do anything else, except write.

We’ve compiled the below list out of curiosity. We don’t think writers need daily word counts, and we certainly don’t think you need to be producing thousands of words per day to be successful. Even if you’re just writing 100 words a day, every day, over a year that is close to 40,000 words. A massive achievement in its own right.

Stephen King’s daily word count: 1,000 words

As the years have gone by, Stephen King’s daily writing routine has slowed down. He still writes every day, even on the weekends, but as he says, “I used to write more and I used to write faster – it’s just aging. It slows you down a little bit.” Earlier on, he used to pump out 2,000 words a day, but these days, he aims to write for about four hours each day and gets down about 1,000 words.

Read more: Stephen King’s Writing Routine

Robert Caro’s daily word count: 3 pages

In an interview with The Paris Review, when asked whether he aims to hit a writing quota every day, Robert Caro replied, “I have to produce. I write down how many words I’ve done in a day. Not to the word—I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make me remember it’s a job. I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t, but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself.”

Read more: Robert Caro’s Writing Routine

John Grisham’s daily word count: 1,000 to 2,000 words

In a 2016 interview with Brian Koppelman, John Grisham described his daily writing routine; the same one that has powered his work for the past 20 odd years. “I’ll write for a couple of hours, take a break, then get back into the novel,” the best-selling author explained. “On a good day I’ll write 2,000 words. A slow day is 1,000. But you do that five days a week for six months and that’s a lot of pages, and that’s how the books are written.”

Read more: John Grisham’s Writing Routine

Mark Twain’s daily word count: 1,400 to 3,000 words

The daily word count of the American writer seemed have to fluctuated dramatically over the course of his life. As quoted in Chapters from My Autobiography, Twain recounted his writing routine for works like The Innocents Abroad and Following the Equator.

I wrote the rest of “The Innocents Abroad” in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvellously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days, the average was more than three thousand words a day—nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called “Following the Equator” my average was eighteen hundred words a day; here in Florence (1904), my average seems to be fourteen hundred words per sitting of four or five hours.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY | MARK TWAIN