DeLillo has answered the working-habits question many times and never once with a word count. What he gives instead is a shape: four hours, a run, two or three hours more, and a single paragraph on each sheet of paper.
The Only Numbers He Gives Are Hours
Asked about his working habits in the Paris Review in 1993, DeLillo described the day precisely. Morning at a manual typewriter, about four hours, then out for a run, which he called a way to shake off one world and enter another. Then back to it in the later afternoon for two or three hours more, into what he called book time, which passes without your noticing.
No coffee and no snack food, and he had given up cigarettes years earlier. A photograph of Borges near the desk to break the spell when he catches himself at the window. Six or seven hours of work, and no accounting whatsoever of what comes out of them.
One Paragraph, One Page
The method he developed in the early 1980s is the reason a word count would tell you nothing about him. DeLillo puts a single paragraph on each sheet of paper. When the paragraph ends, even a three-line paragraph, he rolls in a fresh sheet. The white space around it lets him see the sentences clearly and makes rewriting easier.
Think about what that does to a daily total. A good session might yield four sheets of paper carrying four short paragraphs. By word count that is a poor day. By his method it is the work. The typewriter serves the same purpose: he has talked about needing the physical impact of the keys and about having a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words as they land on the page.
The Range in the Finished Books
Seventeen novels between Americana in 1971 and The Silence in 2020. The Paris Review noted that Americana took him about four years, after which five more novels arrived across the following seven. The pace has been anything but uniform.
The books themselves swing wildly in size. Underworld ran 827 pages in the 1997 Scribner hardback. Point Omega, published in 2010, ran 117. The same working method and the same paragraph-per-page discipline produced a book seven times the length of the other.
That range argues against a daily target more clearly than anything DeLillo has said out loud. A writer whose books run from 117 pages to 827 has no number to work toward. Each book ends up the size it needs to be, and the method stays identical either way.
For the Olympia typewriter, the one-sheet-at-a-time habit, and privacy as method, see the full Don DeLillo writing routine page.
Reading how Don DeLillo worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- Give the paragraph room. One paragraph per page is easy to imitate and it changes how you read your own sentences.
- Split the day with something physical. DeLillo's midday run is a transition device as much as it is exercise.
- Count hours when your work resists counting words. Four in the morning and two or three later is a full day by any standard.
- Let the book find its own length. Nothing in his method changes between a 117-page novel and an 827-page one.