Saunders is missing from every famous-authors-daily-word-count list, and that is not an oversight. He has never given a number in thirty years of interviews, because the measure would not describe what he actually does at the desk.
The Unit Is a Pass, Not a Word
Asked about his working day by Sixty Six in 2018, Saunders described a schedule and a loop. He gets to the desk around eight and works until two or three with a break somewhere in the middle. What happens inside that block is the same operation over and over.
I put it in the computer and print it out again and just keep doing that as many times as I can manage to do it with clarity in the course of a day.
George Saunders, interview with Sixty Six, 2018
Writing in The Guardian in 2017 about what writers really do when they write, he described the process as an obsessive, iterative application of preference, carried out across what he called sometimes hundreds of drafts. That is his own unit of account. Ask him how a story is going and the honest answer is a draft number.
On the days that matter most, his net word count is negative. Cutting a paragraph that told the reader something they already knew is progress, and a counter registers it as a loss. Any writer whose real work is compression will find daily word targets actively misleading.
What a Low-Output Career Looks Like
Since CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in 1996 he has published four major story collections, two novels, a novella, two nonfiction books, and a children's book. That is thirty years of work. Stephen King gets through that many titles in under a decade.
Lincoln in the Bardo shows the timescale best. The image that started it, Abraham Lincoln visiting his son's crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, arrived in the mid-1990s. Saunders spent roughly six years trying to make it work as a play before writing across the top of the manuscript that he should run away and not write it. He carried the idea for about twenty years, gave himself a conditional six-month contract after Tenth of December came out in 2013, and published the novel in February 2017 at 368 pages.
Twenty years of thinking and four years of drafting produced a Booker Prize. No daily word count would have made that schedule look acceptable at any point along the way.
Why the Number Would Lie
Saunders reads his drafts aloud and marks every place where his attention drops. Fixing one of those spots can take an hour and change six words. A day of that leaves almost nothing to count, and it can be the day a story finally works.
Word targets have a real use. They keep a first draft moving, which is genuinely hard. What Saunders demonstrates is that they stop describing the job the moment revision becomes the main event, and for him revision has always been the main event.
For the full picture of how he works, including the printed drafts, the reading aloud, and the interest-drop test, see the complete George Saunders writing routine page.
Reading how George Saunders 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
- Count passes when you are revising. Draft seven of a chapter is real progress, and a word count cannot see it. Keep a second number.
- Let a revision day end in the negative. If the piece is shorter and better than it was at nine in the morning, the day worked.
- Read it aloud and mark every drop in attention. The ear finds the slack sentence the eye slides past. That is the whole of Saunders's method in one instruction.
- Give a scary project a conditional contract. Six months, nobody told, permission to walk away. That is how he finally started the book he had avoided for twenty years.