Summertime Is Prime Time for Writing
And a daily word count can keep you from squandering it.
For most people in academia, whether teachers or graduate students, summertime is the best time for writing. Even if you continue to teach, meetings are often at a minimum, and it is not unusual to have parts of the summer with blessedly clear calendars for days and weeks in a row.
Yet writers can always find ways to get less done than they intend. I recommend that if you have a long-term writing project (book, dissertation, etc.), take time in the next week to figure out how much you need to get done this summer, and how much daily and weekly progress you need to make to hit your goals.
Say for example you are working on a dissertation that you hope to defend in time for May 2025 graduation. A horrible goal is something like “I need to work on my dissertation this summer.” No, you need to get much more specific and tangible than that.
Let’s say that your dissertation will be roughly 80,000 words total, and you have written 10,000 so far. You have about three months of relatively free time for writing this summer, or about 60 writing days (minus weekends and holidays). How many words would you ideally write this summer?
Well, if your schedule gets a lot busier during the semester, you might want to shoot for 40,000 words total. That would mean you need to write 667 words on average (666 would be weird) on your 60 writing days this summer in order to meet your goal.
This is also a better approach than “I want to write four chapters this summer.” Chapters can be different lengths, of course, but more importantly, breaking your goals down by chapters doesn’t tell you how much you need to get done each day. I find it extremely helpful to know how much I need to write each day to stay on track. Once I am done with my daily word count, I can move on to other things (reading, grocery shopping, fishing…).
Some might say “I can’t write 667 words a day.” OK, fair enough. But if you simply cannot average that much a day, it does not change the fact that you have a future deadline and minimum word count. Something has to give. For many writers, what ends up happening is that they commit to projects that they were never realistically going to complete on time. This leads to frustration on the part of the writer, the adviser, and (where relevant) the publisher.
Look at it this way: whenever you do finish a long term writing project, you will have averaged a certain number of words written per day. Why not contend with that number on the front end of a project? If you do so, you will have a far clearer sense of what it is going to take for you to finish in a timely fashion.
My latest book Christian History: From the Reformation to the Present is due out with B&H Academic in September, available for pre-order now.