Down for the count
Aspiring writers often are curious about the work habits of professional authors. A favourite metric is word count. How many words do famous writers typically produce each day? Anecdotal evidence is available, sometimes organized in lists and charts. Two things soon become apparent. Successful writers do have a daily expectation, or habit, or target or even quota. They don’t wait around for inspiration. And the daily count generally ranges between 500 and 2,000 words. In one literary accounting, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene clock in at 500 words, W. Somerset Maugham at 1,000, Mark Twain at 1,400, Jack London at 1,500 and Stephen King at 2,000.
There are outliers, but they’re almost all at the high end, that is, more than 2,000 words a day. Hardly anyone falls below the 500-word threshold. Hitting a target or quota sets the writer free for the rest of the day. Some even quit in the middle of a sentence once the magic number is achieved, then pour themselves a stiff one.
A more refined scale might separate authors of fiction from authors of non-fiction. Both genres can require careful preparation. Works of imagination, for example, sometimes draw on historical or field research. Non-fiction, in my experience, demands a greater accumulation of facts that must be closely adhered to in the writing. Composition is necessarily slow. I stuck to a daily quota of 500 words when writing my non-fiction books, and some days barely limped over the finish line. Accuracy is exhausting.
But what about working journalists, who write daily news copy rather than books? The data here are less readily available. H.L. Mencken said he occasionally churned out 5,000 words a day for the Baltimore Herald in 1901. Carl Bernstein’s recent memoir says he once produced 5,000 words for an afternoon edition of the Washington Star in the early 1960s, though that was unusual. Reporters in understaffed newsrooms today often complain (or sometimes boast) about the number of articles they have to submit each day.
The news industry’s deeply troubled shift to digital has attracted an army of charlatans promising quick fixes. Predictably, journalists are told to create more with less. Productivity – that’ll get us out of this jam! But the faster the hamster wheel spins, the deeper the rut. This misguided strategy is abetted by digital tools that track reader engagement, thereby reducing news items to cans of beans on grocery shelves. Commoditization can make reading the news just about as appetizing.
Successful authors set their own quotas or targets based on a commitment to quality. Word counts may be high or low, but their quality standards are fixed. In the same way, impactful journalism is about delivering gold into a realm that has been steadily debasing the coinage. Snake-oil salesmen touting daily quotas of words or articles are charting a fast track to oblivion, for reporters as much as news outlets. Instead, journalists need to set their quality-control regulators on high and only then calibrate that day’s word count, down to zero if necessary. And if the newsroom boss sneers at the impertinence, it’s time to get out. That ship is going down.
Jan. 31, 2022
