Write More in 2022

By Ruth Barringham

I was reading a book recently about Pulp Fiction writers and how much they used to write.

In it, there was a question raised, which was, what do writers do?

Naturally, the obvious answer was, writers write.

Wrong.

The answer was, writers work.

Of course this book was talking about writers who earn all their income from writing, which at the time was Pulp Fiction Writers. But it would also refer to any professional writer today.

If you’re not serious about being a writer and you only write for the fun of it without getting anything published, then that’s fine.

But if you’re serious about being a professional writer, then you need to work. Writing must be your business, not your hobby, and it must be prioritized every day.

Also, you need to track your word count every day. You can’t earn money from writing if you never write. And we all know that the more you write, the more money you can earn,

Also, you need to enjoy writing. If you don’t enjoy it, your displeasure will show in your writing.

But if you love what you do, your writing will be good.

The question is, how much writing do you want to do this year?

To earn as much as you can from your writing, you need to know what it is you want to write and how much writing you need to do.

The old pulp fiction writers used to write up to a million words a year, which is over 80,000 words a month.

To break that down into a daily rate, it’s 2,778 words a day, or 3,000 just to round it up.

Is it possible to write this much every day?

It is if you have a plan and can stick to it. Naturally, you’d have to cut out a few timewasters like TV watching, gossiping and social media, but that’s a good thing.

Depending on the type of writing you want to do, you may write a lot less than a million words a year. Either way, you need to have a plan and be able to track your word count.

Tracking what you do also makes you write more because you don’t want to see low numbers or blank spaces.

And to that end, I have a free excel spreadsheet for you that not only tracks your daily word count, but also automatically tracks your monthly and yearly word count too.

This is a spreadsheet that I asked my excel-expert husband to make for me, and he did.

And now I want to share it with anyone else who wants to track their wordcount in 2022.

The column headings (email, blogposts, etc.) are for my benefit, but you can change them on the Summary page.

Use the link below to download the spreadsheet and share it with others too.

word-count.xlsl.