Last year I did my NaNo in longhand and averaged 3,000 per day. However that was an average, and there were several days when I didn't meet 700. On 2 days last year I did over 7,000 words each of the two days and on one day when I had nothing to do all day long, I wrote over 10,000 words... it was my best day ever (not just for NaNo!) In the end, I hit 50,000 on day 17, and I wrote 183,000 words in 30 days. It took over 400 sheets of paper and an entire pac of Bic crystal stix.
uhm.... when people asked me last year how I did it... my answer: Over twenty long years of practice. I do this kind of thing every day anyways, so writing NaNo is nothing unusual for me, I'd be writting the 3,000 words a day even if I wasn't entering NaNo, so I might as well enter NaNo and have fun while I write!
Advice? well, I write while sitting on the ground in my garden, cross-legged (lotus postition I think they call it), with my loose leaf on my lap on a clip-boards and a totebag full of extra paper and lots of ink refills. I do about 90% of my writing outdoors in my garden, with one or more (or all) of my 9 cats and 2 dogs sitting on me.
yah for longhanders! WOO-HOO!
I use college ruled lined paper, and count how many words on one line, than write that number down at the end of the line, and repeat this for the next line, and the next line, etc for all 32 lines on the page. Than with a claculator I add up all of those numbers and write the total word count for that page at the top. I do this for each page I wrote that day. Than I take all the page cout totals and add them up, giving me my final word count for the day.
I write and average of 13 words per line or 340 words per page, but I never average my word count because on some pages I wrote only 225 words or only 7 words per line, etc.
I didn't start writing like this for NaNoWriMo either, I've been writing longhand and keeping track of my word counts like this since 1978, when I wrote my first book. I've been writing for a very long time... long before computers and laptops. For me handwriting is not only easier, but it's also a lot faster. Of course over the past 20+ years, I've also developed my own form of italic short hand so I am able to write very, very fast, though most can not actually read what I wrote afterwards.
Three days ago, I did a non-NaNo story test run to see if I was ready for NaNoWriMo, I wrote steady for 5 hours, afterwards I counted my words. My total: 11,052 words in 5 hours.
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