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Part 220 - Elephant

Grahm Greene put 500 words on the page, five days a week.

· consistency,joy,work,mind

Q: How do you eat an elephant?

A: One bite at a time.

The only way to make a book is to write words on paper (or type them on a screen). There's no other way. You must get words on the page. How to do that?

The very notion of 55,000 words is daunting. That's about how many words it takes to create a 200 page book. Fifty five thousand words.

My wife is a writer. She has a daily word count for which she aims. She works five or six days a week. She makes sure to get her daily word count in. Sometimes she gets inspired and fills more words than her daily minimum, but she always works to a daily count.

Ernest Hemingway worked a scheduled 500 words per day. Never went over. Made himself stop at 500 to keep his story fresh and alive.

Stephen king hammers out 2,000 words a day. Says his characters go stale if he doesn't keep up that pace.

Grahm Greene famously put 600 words a day on the page - five days a week. 600 words. That's it. Just 600 words. You can do that. Can't you? Two or three pages. That's it.

My pal Robert has his number. Kim has her number. Grahm Greene had his number. I have a notion it doesn't really matter what the number is, as long as one keeps at it. Take it one bite at a time and pretty soon, you've got yourself a book.