Writer Wednesday: How Many Words Per Day?

We writers love our metrics. Go on to any writing forum, and you'll see endless questions about how long a book should be for a given genre or publisher, how many words per chapter it should contain, how many pages in an average novel - the list goes on. The number one metric writers love to track, though, is the daily wordcount. How many words per day can you write? How many should you write?Obviously, the answer to those questions will be different for everyone. They also won't necessarily be the same: just because you can write a few thousand words per day doesn't mean that you should. Your current project might be the kind of thing that demands a slower pace.In general, though, I think it can be useful to set yourself a daily wordcount goal. Note the word daily - the most effective writing goals are ones that challenge you to write something every single day. Even if you don't make it to your target, you'll at least have a few hundred more words at the end of any given day than you did at the beginning.At the moment, I'm challenging myself to write 50k words over the next month - in other words, I'm doing my own private NaNoWriMo. It's a tough goal to meet, and I'm still not sure if I'll be able to manage it, but there's no harm in being ambitious. Even if I end up falling short by 10k words (let's say), I'll still have written 40k words in a month, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Aim high enough, and even falling short will be an achievement.If you're one of those writers who likes to have even more detailed information on your output than just 'how many words per day', I suggest using something like Beeminder. It lets you set goals, then gives you an absurdly detailed chart keeping track of whether you're on the right path towards achieving them. For the truly hardcore, it also has a feature that lets you pledge a certain amount of money (starting at $5). Go too far off track and your credit card gets billed for that amount. Now that's what I call a good incentive to get writing.