This is a guest post by Thursday Bram. Thanks, Thursday!

For most freelance writers, there are two very simple ways to measure how productive we are: how much money we earn in a given day and how many words we write. Of course, there’s an obvious connection between the two, but I’ve found that many freelance writers seem to focus on the word count as the ultimate indicator of productivity. Maybe it’s because we typically don’t get paid for our work immediately or maybe it’s because most of us seem to have personal writing projects on the side. But the bottom line is that we want that number to be as high as possible.

But How Many Words Does a Freelance Writer Need to Write a Day?

In order to keep up with every other freelancer out there, we start thinking about how many words we need to write a day — how productive we have to be. The problem is that there is no good answer. There are freelance writers who turn out 4,000 words in a day. There are freelance writers who turn out 400. And, while this may seem counter-intuitive, writers at both levels may be earning the same amount of money.

The question shouldn’t be how many words do we need to write to consider ourselves productive writers, but how do we find the right words? Take Ernest Hemingway (who had a good journalistic career, beyond his better known novels and short stories). He wrote between 500 and 1,000 words a day. But, whether or not you’re a Hemingway fan, it’s hard to argue that they weren’t the right 500 words.

Where Are Your Limits?

My record for writing in a given day is just under 10,000 words in a 14-hour period. They certainly weren’t great words, but they were down on paper by the end of the day. I couldn’t write at all for the next four days. I may have been sitting at a desk the whole time, but I was physically exhausted by the experience. I certainly don’t recommend that any freelance writer shoot for 10,000 words a day on a regular basis.

But it is important to know where your limits are. When I first started writing, a few hundred words exhausted me almost as much as 10,000 words does now. It took me days to write an article, even a short one. But practice does improve writing muscles. I set myself a quota — a daily word count — to meet that was right on the edge of what I was comfortable with. Slowly, but surely, that word count has moved upwards.

If you measure your productivity as a writer on the basis of the number of words you write each day, it’s important to keep building on both the number of words you can comfortably write as well as the quality of those words. Practice is the best way to do both. Ideally, you’ll be practicing on assignments you’ve already landing, but even writing magazine assignments that you’ve created for yourself when you don’t have a full plate — you can offer them to magazines on spec, turn them into blog posts for your own site or even think about putting them into a longer format — can help you continue to move forward.

[Note from Linda: You can also practice by writing query letters!]

Thursday Bram is a full-time freelance writer. She blogs about perspectives in productivity at Constructively Productive. You can find more about Thursday on her website, ThursdayBram.com.

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