I’m always questioning if one thousand words a day is sufficient for my writing output, whether I should be writing every day, and if my writing process of a few hours each day is sufficient. A few other bloggers have addressed the question and basically decided one to two thousand words a day is their normal output.

But restless last night and this morning, I searched for other writers’  opinions about these matters.

Isaac Asimov, author of over five hundred books, wrote every day. He used a simple writing style, and he didn’t care about critics. Those were essentially his three rules, according to the post.

So there you have it. Write every day. Thank you, Isaac.

Now Novel had some information from J.K. Rowling. “One of J.K. Rowling’s most famous quotes is: “Sometimes you have to get your writing done in spare moments here and there.”” That’s a good reminder for how fortunate I am to be able to carve out and dedicate time to novel writing. My wife is very supportive in this, and that helps a helluva lot.

Aerogramme’s Writers’ Studios offer thirteen quotes on writing from Octavia Butler. My favorite:

“And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write – every day, no excuses. It’s so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they’d rather clean the toilet than do the writing.”

Every day! Thank you, Ms Butler. She’s one of my favorite authors. Selfishly, I wished she’d not died so young (fifty-four) and suddenly, because I want to read more from her. I’m thankful that she wrote and published what she did.

In Diane Prokop’s post about Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, she includes this quote from him:

“I work roughly five or six hours a day, five to six days a week, and I try to get a thousand words per session, a thousand new words. I don’t count rewrites.”

Rewrites and editing count against my time slot. I’m beginning to suspect that’s a problem, that I should be setting aside another period to do these matters. I like the way Chabon puts this, “I try to get a thousand words per session.”  That leaves some latitude.

From this search born of angst and self-examination, I returned to my touchstone of belief about writing: find what works for you and do it. That means that I write almost every day, probably not writing a week to ten days a year due to illness, travel or interruptions, like power outages and snow storms. I try to get over a thousand words per session. I don’t use word counts as the whip to keep going any longer. They worked well in the beginning but I discarded them. But if I’m thinking about quitting on a day because I don’t seem to be getting anything done, I’ll undertake a word count. If it’s below nine hundred, I order myself to go on.

Usually.

Smile.

Time to write drink a four shot mocha and write like crazy, at least one more time.

Into the madness!