How many hours a day do you write?

[Notmytelescope]

I’ve finally found myself a few days a week to apply myself to writing and I was wondering what is realistic? I want to get going fairly quickly but I won’t be able to write every day, but I have several hours a few times a week. Any suggestions on how to manage my time?

Like you, I have a few hours a week for writing now. I block out the time and give those spare hours over completely to writing - no errands, no housework, no facebook. I treat it as work. I do the Pomodoro(?) thing where you do a solid 25 minutes then have a 5 minute break. my rule is I don't move during those 25 minutes - I just write, no distractions allowed!

Hi Phoolani, Thanks for the tip about the pomodoro technique. I was using write or die but I think this sounds more sensible. A very good point about the housework and errands thing. I think I’ll try basing myself away from home tomorrow and see if that lets me get more done?

I have this week started a routine like @notmytelescope says. I block off two hours everyday where I focus on my writing. So far I have managed to write 1000 words over 3 days.

With my first book (unpublished) I wrote 1,000 words a day for 80 days and had a first draft. I spent two hours writing that and then another hour first thing in the morning editing it as I went along. I found the further on I was in the book, the less editing needed to be done. There were no structural edits hence no publication.

Do these of you who write for a few hours a day also put on music?
Depending on what it is, sometimes music helps me and other times it distracts.

I've managed to write a novel during my lunch breaks at work! I write for 30 minutes Monday to Friday.

I used a website called Write Track. You can set up the days you want to write on, and targets for those days. I blocked out weekends and holidays so my target was 0 for those days.

Then you log in every day to input how many words you've written. I found it really motivating, as I was afraid to log on and record a number smaller than my target for the day!

I started on the 27 July and have written 50,000 so far, and am heading towards my ending (it's a Young Adult novel).

I'm aiming to write 1500 words per week. This week (I've just started) I've written for about 2 hours, one hour each session, to get this far.

I think I'd also like to edit as I go, so will maybe need to factor in another hour each week, so maybe 3-4 hours a week in total.

I'm hoping to have my first draft completed by the end of the year.

About an hour. I have to snatch my time whilst my baby sleeps and children are at school but I tend to write better in short snaps anyway so this suits me quite well (but I would love to see how much I could actually get done in one day if time was no object).

My first book for children was about 76,000 words but I had to write a chapter a day for my son who I was reading it to in the evenings, a great stick to make me work and I got it done in about 17 days but then spent forever editing it and getting it as just right as I could.
Second book was much the same as he wanted that too but I'm afraid I took months on book 3.
I've just finished a book for a more adult readership that's 107,000 words that took about four months to write but I've been editing on Critique Circle since the end of July as you can only post one chapter a week. That's been a really good process.
I've just started book two now and have done 11,000 words, about 6,000 of them this week. I should be doing it right now.