I’ve heard it said that writ­ing a novel is kind of like eat­ing an ele­phant. And how do you eat an ele­phant? One bite at a time. Same thing for a novel. 80,000 – 100,000 words seems like a lot, seems insane to write that much when you really look at the num­bers, but it’s a lot eas­ier if you take it in small bites. When I first heard that pro­fes­sional nov­el­ists like like Stephen King and James Rollins write 2,000 words a day, I thought that was fine for them; they didn’t have day jobs. (Actu­ally, Rollins writes six pages a day, but when you con­sider that the aver­age dou­ble spaced man­u­script page in a pro­por­tional font like Times or Cam­bria runs a bit over 300 words, this comes out to 1,800 words, or 2,000 if you aver­age 333 words a page. Close enough.) There was no way I could write that much and still have a job and a rea­son­able social life.

Actu­ally, folks, it’s not just pos­si­ble, it’s rel­a­tively easy. Here’s how.

I have a spread­sheet that I mod­i­fied from the one Tobias Buck­ell uses to track my progress as I write. It has all kinds of useful/​encouraging infor­ma­tion, but the real beauty of it is that I only have to enter two num­bers each day: total word count for the whole man­u­script and the hours I spent writ­ing for the day. It cal­cu­lates every­thing else for me. In par­tic­u­lar, for any given day, it tells me:

• My cur­rent word count for the day
• My “tar­get” word count for the day, defined as yesterday’s total plus 2,000, round­ing up to the near­est thou­sand. So if I fin­ished at 51,212 yes­ter­day, than today’s tar­get is 54,000.
• The num­ber of words remain­ing to get to my min­i­mum of 2,000.

Cur­rently, with a word count of 51,521, those num­bers are 309, 54,000 and 1,691. Now, here’s the magic. No mat­ter what I’m doing, one of those four num­bers is going to be within a cou­ple hun­dred words of a mul­ti­ple of 500. So I don’t have to look at the goal if it’s still far away. I’m 2,479 words away from my goal of 54,000 today. I don’t want to think about that. What I want to think about is that I’m only 191 words away from hit­ting 500 for the day. That’s it. 191 words. That’s less than a page. I can write a page, can’t I?

And that’s the secret. By con­stantly updat­ing my word count into this spread­sheet, I always have a quick, eas­ily attain­able goal. A small bite. Let’s say I write some more. (brb)

Okay, now the man­u­script is up to 51,741 words, putting me at 529 for the day, 1,471 to go until my 2k min­i­mum. Now both of the lat­ter num­bers are 471 words away from hit­ting 1,000, and that’s more than a page. Not much more, but it’s a big­ger bite. But hey, I’m only 259 words (less than a page) from hit­ting 52,000! So that’s the next mile marker. I’ll write to 52,000, then update my word count again and look around. Maybe check the Twit­ter. I aver­age roughly 1,000 words an hour, though I can dou­ble that pace if I close my eyes and just ham­mer away with­out wor­ry­ing about punc­tu­a­tion or spelling, which means 259 words is about 15 min­utes. Who doesn’t have 15 min­utes to write?

See how this works? Each step is easy. So easy, in fact, that you don’t notice how long the jour­ney is at all. And that’s the key to get­ting 2,000 words a day, every day, in a life filled with job oblig­a­tions, fam­ily needs, movies to watch, Hulu, Twit­ter and every­thing else that takes up your days. You squeeze in these tiny bites of writ­ing here and there, scat­tered in between all the other stuff. Most days, you have more down time than you real­ize. I’ve learned that if I mix in a 500 – 700 word sprint at Chipo­tle over lunch — a quar­ter to third of my quota — with a bite here and a bite there, I can get up to 4,000 words in a work day with­out my actual job suf­fer­ing at all. I’m still work­ing the day job as hard as always, but I’m spend­ing my down time writ­ing rather than surf­ing. And if I can do 4,000 before I go home, then there’s really no excuse not to get at least 2,000.

This Excel-​based work­flow, geeky and accountant-​like though it might be, has done two invalu­able things for me. It’s instilled a ded­i­ca­tion to write every day, but if I don’t there will be a big gap in the spread­sheet, and it’s taught me how to get my words in dribs and drabs, but still get them. I’m not afraid of 2,000 words a day any­more. I know I can do it. I know that on a good day I can dou­ble it. And so can you.