Most (not all) writers I know write every day. My own personal goal is five pages a day. Sometimes I do more. Sometimes less. I have written a book (S.O.R Losers) in one twenty-four hour period. The longest time it took me to write a book (Bright Shadow), start to finish, was fourteen years. Needless to say I didn’t work on that one every day. The shortest time elapsing between the time I started to write to when the published book was in my hand was eleven months (Encounter at Easton)

The other day I read an interview with a British author who said she tried to write a thousand words a day. A writer friend told me he gets up at four o clock  each morning and stays at his desk till he gets ten pages done. Someone once told me that Stephen King used to write a hundred pages a day. Anthony Trollop, an important British Victorian writer wrote, “I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And … my page has been made to contain 250 words… I have had every word counted.” 

But—as I like to remind would–be writers—if you wrote just one page a day, at the end of the year you’d have 365 pages—a pretty big book!