Output

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It’s been said – or written, what I’m about to tell you I read somewhere, sometime, someplace – that G. K. Chesterton, Catholic convert and apologist extraordinaire, was an exceptionally prolific writer.

If you take all his written works and divide it by the length of his literary career, you’ll find that his output averages to something like 4,000 words a day.

4,000 words a day. And I’m not talking first-draft words, either. 4,000 perfectly publishable words, every day, day in and day out.

By comparison, I average about 700 words a day, words that I think are okay, but that, so far, are not “perfectly publishable.” That’s a fraction more than a sixth of G. K.’s output.

“Don’t get so down on yourself, Hopper,” I hear you saying at your computer monitor. “He was a professional writer, and you are not. You have daily chores to do, two very young children to care for, an elusive job to hunt down.”

Well, thanks, that may be so. But if I was hardcore, there would be an hour of writing before the house wakes up. The two hours of Patch’s nap would be filled with the click-clacking of a laptop keyboard condensing thoughts and images out of the LE-noosphere. And there’d be two hours after the house quiets down in the evening for brainstorming and writing and revising. That’s five hours a day, 35 hours a week. That’s my 4,000 words a day, almost.

Just ask Lucien if you believe I’m being too hard on myself.

Okay. October goal to increase output by … a hundred percent. 1500 words a day. Not exactly Chestertonian, but easily doable. Easily.