I haven't had much success with larger word count goals. What's helped me get some words on the page nearly every day is something I heard in a podcast a while back. There was a prolific novelist who wrote something crazy like 80 novels. So, of course, people asked him how the hell he wrote so many books. His answer was, "I write 200 crappy words per day." The point being, those 200 crappy words can often lead to more words and possibly even less crappy words, but you have to get the gears moving somehow.
I've basically been doing that ever since and it's worked well for me. There are days where the 200 is a slog so I call it a day early and others where they flow more freely. The 200 crappy words thing has taken the pressure off of me.
Last year, I set a minimum daily writing goal of 500 words--or two pages of my writing notebook. Hardly a drop in the pond but they stacked up, and it felt doable even when I procrastinated until late in the night. Later I expanded to 800 words as I switched to a larger writing notebook, and a year later, I had a 240K novel. Every word is one more than you would have had if you hadn't written at all.
Congrats on your 6K words!
I haven't had much success with larger word count goals. What's helped me get some words on the page nearly every day is something I heard in a podcast a while back. There was a prolific novelist who wrote something crazy like 80 novels. So, of course, people asked him how the hell he wrote so many books. His answer was, "I write 200 crappy words per day." The point being, those 200 crappy words can often lead to more words and possibly even less crappy words, but you have to get the gears moving somehow.
I've basically been doing that ever since and it's worked well for me. There are days where the 200 is a slog so I call it a day early and others where they flow more freely. The 200 crappy words thing has taken the pressure off of me.
Last year, I set a minimum daily writing goal of 500 words--or two pages of my writing notebook. Hardly a drop in the pond but they stacked up, and it felt doable even when I procrastinated until late in the night. Later I expanded to 800 words as I switched to a larger writing notebook, and a year later, I had a 240K novel. Every word is one more than you would have had if you hadn't written at all.