Didion is the wrong writer to ask this question about, and the reason why is more interesting than a number would be. Her working method involved retyping what already existed before adding anything new, which means her typed output on any given day bore almost no relationship to how much book she had at the end of it.
Why a Daily Count Wouldn't Mean Anything
Most writers add. Didion added and re-made in the same motion, and she was specific about it when Hilton Als asked whether she rewrote much.
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even.
Joan Didion, The Paris Review, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1, 2006
Run the numbers on that and the problem becomes obvious. On day forty of a book, Didion might type nine thousand words and end the day with three hundred she didn't have that morning. A word counter would report a heroic session. The manuscript would have grown by a page.
She was doing it for rhythm rather than for correction. Retyping put the previous day's cadence back in her hands before she asked for a new sentence, which matters enormously for a writer whose whole reputation rests on the sound of the line. She said in the same interview that the marking-up happened at night, so the pages were ready to retype in the morning, and that the practice got her past what she called the blank terror. More on the mechanics is on whether Didion wrote by hand or typed.
The One Book With a Clock on It
The Year of Magical Thinking is the exception, because the dates are on record. Didion began it on 4 October 2004 and finished on 31 December, completing it a year and a day after her husband John Gregory Dunne died. That's eighty-nine days for a book that runs around 240 pages. She described it to Als as three months, and confirmed she marked it up every night, because so much of the book depends on echo and repetition.
Even at that pace the arithmetic is modest. Roughly 240 pages in eighty-nine days is under three pages a day of finished text. What makes the achievement remarkable has nothing to do with volume and everything to do with the state she wrote it in.
Her Books Are Short
Page counts are worth knowing because they cut against the reputation. Slouching Towards Bethlehem runs 238 pages, The White Album 222, Blue Nights 208. Play It as It Lays comes in at 214 and is built from eighty-four chapters, several of them a single paragraph and a few of them one or two lines.
Those eighty-four chapters are the clearest evidence of what Didion was optimizing for. A chapter that is one sentence long has been cut to that length on purpose, and the white space around it is doing work. A writer thinking in those terms has no use for a daily word target, because the target would reward the wrong behaviour on every page.
The only word counts in Didion's working life came from outside it. She spent years writing to magazine specifications, first at Vogue, then for The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and eventually The New York Review of Books. An assignment arrives with a length attached, and the discipline of hitting it is real. What she never did was import that constraint into the books, where the length was hers to decide.
Compare that with Stephen King's 2,000 words a day, which is a good system for a writer producing long narrative fiction at volume. Didion's unit was the sentence rather than the day's output, and she would retype a hundred pages to get one of them right.
Reading how Joan Didion 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
- Retype instead of rereading. Retyping yesterday's pages puts the rhythm back in your hands in a way that reading them silently never does.
- Mark up at night, retype in the morning. Didion did the judging when the day's optimism had worn off and the fixing when she was fresh.
- Pick a unit that matches your form. A word count suits long fiction. If you're working in fragments and white space, count finished sections instead.
- Three pages a day is a book in three months. The Year of Magical Thinking was written at that rate, in the worst year of her life.