This post by one of our most talented short story writers starts as a con report but then gets really interesting when he talks about the propensity to linger over word counts and productivity to the detriment of quality. Professional versus amateur indeed.

Personally, I think it’s more important to be engaged with your text on a daily basis than to worry too much about your daily word count. What do I mean by engaged? I mean fully involved and lost in it, thinking about it. Too many writers don’t think enough about their fiction before entering into it, and while working on it.

I think I wrote about 3,000 words on “Borne” today. Monday through Wednesday I wrote nothing on “Borne” but a few scribbled notes. But I was thinking about it quite a bit, really bearing down on it, for hours over those three days, and the result was that today’s words are, I think, the right ones. And so will the ones tomorrow and Saturday. Then I’ll probably have to think some other stuff through. I might only wind up averaging 300 words a day on Borne. But, like Nathan says, it doesn’t matter.