The last post covered making the time to write. Getting into a writing routine is so important because time is all you have. You might wonder how much time Ayn Rand had on her hands to write her 311,596-word novel The Fountainhead (1943) and her even longer 561,996-word novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Well, here's the answer: not as much as you think.
Let's say you write a mere 300 words per day, roughly one double-spaced page of 12-point Times New Roman type. In 17 days (a bit more than half a month), you'd have a 5,000 word short story; in 133 days (not quite four-and-a-half months), a 40,000-word novella; and in 267 days (nearly nine months), an 80,000-word novel. This is not to say that Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead in 2 years and 10 months and Atlas Shrugged in 5 years and 2 months; perhaps she needed more time, or maybe she needed less. All I'm saying is that word production accumulates.
My word counts are terribly low at the beginning of a writing project, maybe no more than 50 words a day, but then I gain momentum, often to well over 1,000 words a day, sometimes 5,000. I compare this buildup to a footrace. Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record of 9.58 seconds averages 0.958 seconds per 10 meters. But he ran about double that time for the first 10 meters, about 1.85 seconds, and progressively faster until he peaked from the 50- to 80-meter marks, averaging about 0.80 seconds per 10 meters.
Momentum is priceless for writers as well. Once you get into what Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls flow (I strongly recommend his book on the topic), or others call "being in the zone," you're too busy creating to realize, or even to care about, how many words you're producing. You're just concentrating on whatever you're writing about and having fun.
