Writing 15k words in one day was breathtaking for me.
Today I’ve written over 10k words total including this article, that’s the most I’ve ever written in one day and it’s been absolutely eye opening for me.
How did I do this? How can you do this? These questions will be answered down below.
I’m sitting here as we speak typing on my phone at my house, my WiFi isn’t working, and I’m big into self improvement so I’ve been looking into something called a dopamine fast – no external stimuli or pleasure of any kind, just you and yourself. This is extremely good to reset your brain I’ve heard.
I woke up at 4:30 am like normal and got going right away, spending around an hour and a half writing a chapter of my book, around 2.5k words down.
Then some meditation, water and a break for my brain.
Afterword I did some more writing on my book from 6:30 – 8:30 it was a super long session and I got a bit over 3k words done this time, 5.5k total; I had to take a long break, I took a walk, with my dog and did as much meditation as I could manage. When I got back I took a cold shower and by the time I was done it was 10:00.
Back to my writing a huge 4K word chunk by lunch time and two more small chapters were done, that’s 4 total and 9.5k words; of course these chapters will need a lot of revision, but that’s not what I’m doing today, I’m writing.
After my water filled lunch I took a long break, I took a long walk to a lake where I watched nature and zoned out for a bit, meditates, did some yoga, came back and wrote in my journal for 200 more words, then decided to do some cleaning – laundry, dishes, everything I could and I got lost doing that, by the time I was done it was after 4.
I decided to write some more, in two hours I got just over 2k words down, bringing my total to a hair under 12k, it’s 6pm now, and I make the decision to try to hit 15k, that’s a bit over 3k words, and I have an 8:45 bedtime, so not much time left, I do some meditation, and get back on it; I finish my 5th and 6th chapters in 2 hours adding 5.5k words on top of what I had. That’s 17.5k words total, a lot of words.
Atmiditly I do stay up past my bedtime, after writing this 500 word article and doing a bit more writing on my book, maybe 1k words in total, although that writing was mostly revisions.
In total I did 18.5k words in over 9 hours of total work, I had to take breaks inbetween to keep my sanity, as it’s very mentally draining writing this much, and as much as I believe it helped me out, especially with the writing speed it’s not something I’m going to do but maybe once every now and then. The quality of words written was also lacking, after revisions probably only 10-12k of them will stay.
Perhaps next time I’ll go for 20k words, as it was really close to that number, and perhaps if I’d taken a bit less of a break at some points, or if I’d pushed my sleep off longer I could’ve hit it. But alas, I’ll take 18.5k words
Ricky J. Smith 