How many words are there in a day?

‘Write your own name a hundred times,’ T.H. White once commented, ‘and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one-tenth of a new novel.’ No surprise that White should display such a familiarity with the mathematics of writing; all authors do. At least the professional ones do – they have to. When your living depends on not missing deadlines, one question looms all the time: how many words are there in a day?

Actually, assuming that White meant a name comprising one forename and one surname, he was making things slightly tougher on himself than he had to. A 140,000-word book (be it a novel or non-fiction) is on the long side – most come out somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000. Of course it’s rare that a writer will have an exact target as they start work on a book, but still you need a rough idea.