"Write often enough that you don't lose your rhythm or forget what you're up to.  That might mean writing every other day.  Or only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  If you're thinking about your work and reading a lot during that in-between time, it can help make those less-than-every-day writing sessions as productive as an every-day 'Must-Do!' writing routine (which can start to feel like drudgery pretty darn fast)."

The 90-Day Novel

"Save up and invest in your work. Pay yourself a dollar for every 500 words you write. Set that aside, and you'll have enough to publish your book when you're done with it."

"I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hard copy."

"The most successful writers complete their words first thing in the morning. Sure, some work late in the evening or when they can find the time. But if you study the habits of professional authors, you'll see that most of them get up early and complete their words before the afternoon.  It's actually not that hard to write thousands of words on a daily basis. The trick is to follow a routine full of habits that reinforce this goal."

"A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and—voilà!  We are the Creator!  Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!  Nothing could be further from true creativity.  Nothing could be more destructive."

"Keep your scenes ... around two thousand words. I also recommend that you treat your scenes like chapters. That is, each scene should be a chapter in your novel. Why? Two-thousand-word scenes/chapters are potato chip length. That is, if you are about to go to bed and you're reading a terrific novel and the scenes/chapters come in around two-thousand-word bites, you'll tell yourself that you'll read just one more chapter. But if the narrative is really moving after you finish one of these bites, you won't be able to help yourself reading another. If the Story is extremely well told, you'll just keep eating the potato chip scenes all through the night. Whereas, if you cram five scenes into a chapter that ends up being forty pages, the bedside reader will have a much easier time just setting the book down before beginning the long slog through seventy-five hundred words. People like to stop reading when they've finished a chapter, not in the middle of a chapter."

"As long as I'm in that 'zone,' I'm happy enough whether I've written 700 words or, like one crazy day writing The Turning Point, 7,000."

"Worry more about a gripping story and an accessible style than about length."

"The greatest difficulty is the actual writing.  It is always easier to do something else.  Dull, awful jobs like laundry, ironing and weeding suddenly feel like an urgent priority when you're looking at a blank page that needs to be filled with a couple of thousand words before you can sit back and breathe deeply."

"I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000-word book."

"If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain."

"You have to give yourself permission, say to yourself, 'I'm not foolish for wanting this.'  All writers have to fight the same fight.  I have to write 2,000 words today, no matter what.  That's my discipline, and that's me protecting the work."

"To really succeed at self-publishing it seems right now that your best bet is to paint with a shotgun; you're not served by posting one book and walking away but posting a book or project (or product, if you can stand that word) every couple of months."

"If your response to stress is, 'Well, I'm going to hunker down and put out a little word count,' you've just trained your brain to basically turn straw into gold, or water into wine." (artist)

"We often have to write three hundred pages before our soul discloses to us what it is that was waiting to be discovered."

"I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks."

"Writing is not about the muse, or the writer's soul—it's about getting words on paper every day, whether a few words or a few pages."

"Many writers set daily goals—write this many words or pages, or for this many hours.  I don't.  If you set the goal at 1,000 words, some days you're going to write 1,000 words of crap.  And some days you have only one good word in you.  So you should write that word, and then go play golf.  Or, like I do, work on another project."

"Here's a helpful hint if you want to be a writer: When I'm working on a first draft, all I write is 1000 words a day, which isn't that much (I started out with 300, then moved up to 500, now I can do 1000 easy). And if I write my 1000 words, I'm done for the day, even if it only took an hour (it usually takes more, of course, but not always). Novels are anywhere from 60,000 words on up, so it's possible that just sixty days later you might have a whole first draft. The Knife of Never Letting Go is 112,900 words and took about seven months to get a good first draft. Lots of rewrites followed. That's the fun part, where the book really starts to come together just exactly how you see it, the part where you feel like a real writer."