At the end of May, I set a goal for myself: Write 30,000 words in the 30 days of June. A thousand words per day. Every day.

And I spoke this goal out loud. I told my wife. I told some friends. I told my writing group. And because they knew about the goal, they would ask about it. Then I would have to tell them the truth. (And they did, indeed, ask about it.)

I had two reasons for setting the goal.

First, I wanted to make progress on one of my manuscripts. Specifically, the sequel to my debut novel (coming out in 2026). I had done some work on the sequel, but progress had stalled. I did other things in the meantime — another exciting writing project, working on this website, being a guest on a podcast — but the manuscript was languishing.

Second, I wanted kickstart my engagement with the manuscript. I didn’t want to gingerly dip my toes into the shallow end. No, I wanted to cannonball into the deep end and make a splash. I wanted that jolt of electricity like doctors give patients on TV medical shows — you know, with the paddles when they yell, “clear!” I know myself, and I knew I needed to be ambitious. Or at least, ambitious for me, who is also working a job and living my life with my wife and seeing friends and all that stuff.

Without further yapping, here are the results:

When I closed my laptop on June 30th, I had written 30,526 words.

Woo-hoo!

The point of this post is not just to celebrate (and yes, I think we should all celebrate milestones, even if they are artificial and self-imposed). It is also to reflect on the ups and downs of my spring writing sprint. So here three lessons I learned from this experiment, which can hopefully be tips for other writers:

First, progress is uneven.

I did not write 1,000 words each day. In fact, there were seven days when I wrote zero words. Not a single one. And there were five days when I wrote less than 500 words. Here’s the breakdown:

• 0 Words: 7 days
• 1-500 words: 5 days
• 501-1,000 words: 7 days
• 1,001-1,500 words: 2 days
• 1,501-2,000 words: 2 days
• 2,001-2,500 words: 2 days
• 2,501-3,000 words: 4 days
• 3,000+ words: 1 day

So if my goal was to write 1,000 words per day, I failed nearly two-thirds (19 of 30) of the time. In fact, two of the four weeks I failed to average 1,000 words per day. And, there were two stretches where I went five days in a row without hitting 1,000 words in a day.

Yet stepping back, I made the overall goal. Moving forward, I will beat myself up less for days when I don’t hit my goals, because I know there will be others where I exceed them. And in the end, it evens out.

Second, frustration is real.

Like most writers, I fall between the panster (write from the seat of my pants) and plotter (write following a detailed outline of the plot). I consider myself a milemarker writer: I know what happens at milemarker 15, 22, 39, 56, 75, and 100. Yet I tend to be a pantser to get my characters from mile 15 to mile 22.

Sometimes this is exciting — there is a freedom to playing in the sandbox with your characters and seeing where the story takes them. Yet there can also be frustration when you feel creatively tapped and don’t know how to move the story from where it is to where it needs to be. To keep with the metaphor, the road can be bumpy and full of potholes between mile 39 and mile 56. That’s rough, especially when you are working towards a writing goal.

The frustration is real, and it sucks. I don’t have any magical words or “one weird trick” to help you through those times. Sometimes you just gotta power through, write some clunky pages, and move forward. Which brings me to my third lesson.

Third, you can edit later.

I don’t like choppy writing, especially my own clunky writing. And when I get frustrated, I don’t do my best writing. C’mon. We’re writers, and we know when we are not putting our best stuff on the page.

But if we, as writers, are going to crank out books with 70k to 100k (or more) words, they are not all going to be amazing in the first draft. In fact, I only expect a small percentage in my first draft to be really good. I have to keep reminding myself that the job of a first draft is to be done. That’s it. The job is to get the story out of my head and on to paper. And that process is often messy, complicated, convoluted, and yes, choppy.

That’s why we edit. That’s why we revise and rework and polish. Engaging in a writing sprint — whether for a month, a week, a day, or an hour — pushes me to not worry about editing and polishing.

And yet most of us can’t help but to edit our first draft from time to time. For this 30-day sprint, I allowed my desire to edit as I write one concession: When I started writing each day, I could re-read the previous four or five pages and make any minor edits I wanted to. Then, once I started moving forward in the story, I stuck to writing. Editing will come later, and that’s when I can gush over the two amazing sentences in my 100k-word draft and hide in embarrassment at the other 99.9k words.

As much as I enjoyed watching my word count increase over the month, I don’t think July will be as productive. That’s for a number of reasons — personal travel, work obligations, family obligations, and I’m creatively tired. But I am going to keep writing this manuscript and get closer to having that draft done. I want to build on the momentum I started in June.

Best of luck to all the writers out there who are sprinting, jogging, walking, or crawling through your manuscripts. No matter how you are moving forward, know that the whole writing community is cheering you on.