Grisham has two numbers, and the gap between them is the whole story. The one he hands to aspiring writers is a single page, which he prices at about 200 words. The one he uses himself is five to ten times larger.
The Advice Number: One Page
In June 2017 the New York Times Book Review ran his do's and don'ts for writing popular fiction. The first item told writers to produce a page every day, which he priced at about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years, he said, and you have a novel long enough to sell. He had made the same point to Goodreads readers in 2014, telling them that until they were writing a page a day they were not serious about it.
The bar is deliberately low, and it is low because of where it came from. Grisham wrote A Time to Kill that way, in two-hour blocks starting at five in the morning, while running a law practice and sitting in the Mississippi legislature. It took three years. The rule survived because it was the only rule that could survive those conditions.
The Working Number: 1,000 to 2,000
His official site sets out the current routine plainly. Five days a week, at the desk around seven in the morning, with the first three hours as the productive stretch, and a daily output of 1,000 to 2,000 words. He told Brian Koppelman the same thing on The Moment in November 2016, describing a small office behind the house with no phone and no internet connection.
On a good day I'll write 2,000 words. A slow day is 1,000. But you do that five days a week for six months and that's a lot of pages, and that's how the books are written.
John Grisham, The Moment with Brian Koppelman, 2016
Both numbers are honest. The 200-word page is what he thinks an unpublished writer with a job and a family can genuinely protect. The 1,500-word average is what a full-time novelist with a finished outline and a January start date actually produces. Quoting the first as though it described his personal output is the mistake most articles make.
What Six Months of That Adds Up To
Grisham starts on January 1 with the aim of finishing by summer. At his stated range, five days a week for twenty-six weeks, the drafting window holds somewhere between 130,000 and 260,000 words. Published Grisham thrillers land lower, roughly 110,000 to 160,000 by page-count estimate, with the early nineties books at the long end and the recent Camino novels considerably shorter. The difference is what gets cut.
He also outlines every chapter before he starts, writing a few sentences for each so that pacing and chapter length stay even. That is why a modest word count still fits the calendar. He is not searching for the book while he writes it, so 1,500 words of drafting is 1,500 words of forward progress rather than 1,500 words of exploration he will delete in March.
More than fifty consecutive number one bestsellers since 1989 came out of that arithmetic. One page is what he tells you to do on the worst morning of the year. Six months of ordinary mornings is what the books are actually made of.
For the full picture of how he works, including the 5am years, the clean desk rule, and the legal pads, see the complete John Grisham writing routine page.
Reading how John Grisham 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
- Keep two numbers: a floor and a working target. Grisham's floor is one page. His target is ten times that. The floor exists so a bad day still counts as a writing day.
- Price your page in words so the goal is testable. Grisham puts a page at 200 words. Vague targets are easy to argue with at six in the morning.
- Outline first if you want a predictable daily count. His chapter-by-chapter plan is the reason 1,500 words a day reliably becomes a finished novel in six months.
- Put a start date on the calendar. January 1 every year, done by summer. A deadline you repeat annually stops being a deadline and becomes a season.