How I Write Over Half A Million Words A Year

If you want to be prolific you need a plan

Karen Banes
6 min readJul 12, 2023
Photo by Vlada Karpovich on Pexels

Half a million words is, perhaps, not as much as it sounds. It’s around 10,000 words a week, or 2,000 words a day if I take the weekend off (sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t).

The thing is, I’m pretty consistent with this, and have been for the last decade or so, meaning I’ve produced several million words, and I have the systems in place to continue to do so.

That enables me to work full-time as a writer, earn a decent living, and do what I love doing, most of the time. (But not all the time — I work for clients as well as myself, so sometimes I have to write to a brief I find boring as hell. That’s just part of making a living as a writer, for me.)

If this is something you’d like to aim for, here are my tips. If you’re already doing this, or do a lot better, feel free to drop your own tips in the comment section.

Scheduling and prioritizing

Most of us fill our schedule with stuff, and then prioritize it. For me, effective time management works the other way around. I decide on my priorities, and then put them on my schedule.

What your ‘schedule’ actually looks like, will depend on you, of course. It can be an old-fashioned…

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Karen Banes

Freelance writer sharing thoughts on life, society, creativity, and productivity. https://changetheworldwithwords.substack.com