This is going to be a blog entry where I obsess about word counts. However, if you have only come here for an answer to the above question, I will get straight to the point.
Stephen King’s word count is 2000 words per day.
In 2016, Stephen King and George R.R. Martin interviewed each other. Martin asked King, “How the f*** do you write so fast?” In his answer, King revealed that he does his best to write six pages per day.
How many words are in six pages?
According to wordcounter.net, the average word count for six pages is 3000 words for single spaced pages and 1500 words for double spaced.
So does Stephen King write single spaced or double spaced?
In 1988 Stephen King wrote an article called “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully in Ten Minutes.” (Just the title alone has a word count of 11.) In this article he instructs aspiring writers to type, double spaced on nice heavy white paper. However, this was a written a long time ago when people still used typewriters. Stephen King most likely types on a computer now, eliminating the need to type double spaced. According to Paste Magazine, Stephen King uses an iMac or a MacBook Pro.
Stephen King also claimed to write 2000 words per day in his book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”
2000 words per day seems a bit low for a writer as prolific as Stephen King. Perhaps this is just his minimum goal. It is believed that his novel “The Running Man” was written in only one week. That book is 66990 pages long. Meaning that in order to write it in seven days, his word count would have been 9570 word per day.
Why does any of this matter? As a writer, I have no objective way to know whether I’m doing a good job or not. However, at the very least, a daily word count is a concrete way to measure how hard I have been working. A daily word count is certainly not an indication of the quality of a writer. Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene wrote 500 words per day. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 3000 words per day. Michael Crichton writes 10000 word per day!
I consider myself to be a very slow writer. I have made it one of my goals for 2020 to improve my writing speed and my daily word count. My new minimum daily goal is 2000 words per day. When my daily word count reaches or even exceeds 2000, I feel amazing. I feel like I’m Stephen King.
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