The number people quote is 400, and it's the right place to start. Pratchett set a small daily floor, cleared it every evening, and kept clearing it for years while he still had a full-time job. Once writing became the whole job, the floor moved up. Both numbers are real, and the gap between them tells you how he built a career.

The Direct Answer
At least 400 words a day, rising to 1,000 once he wrote full-time.
Good days could run past 6,000, but the daily target was a minimum he refused to skip.

400 While He Still Had a Day Job

For most of the early Discworld years, Pratchett wasn't a full-time novelist. He was a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, working a patch of south-west England that happened to include three nuclear power stations. The books got written around that. He'd finish the day, come home, sit down, and put 400 words on the page before he let the evening start. Four hundred words is about a page. On a good night it took him half an hour. The size of the target was never the clever part. The clever part was doing it again the next night, and the one after, until the pages stacked into a book.

He held the line hard enough that hitting 400 came before anything else, including the shape of the story. If he reached the end of a novel with words still owed for the day, he'd start the next book rather than clock off early. Four hundred done meant 400 done, wherever on the page they happened to fall.

1,000 a Day Once He Went Full-Time

Pratchett left the electricity board in 1987, right after he finished Mort, the fourth Discworld novel, once sales made it safe to write for a living. With a whole day to fill instead of a tired evening, the minimum climbed. His daughter, the writer Rhianna Pratchett, has summed up the arithmetic more cleanly than any biographer.

When Dad was part-time he wrote 400 words a day. Full time it was 1000 words no matter what. If he was having a v good day it could be anything up to 6k.

Rhianna Pratchett

The phrase to hold onto there is 'no matter what.' The count wasn't a hope, and it wasn't an average he'd catch up to later in the week. It was a debt he paid every single day, which is exactly why the total got so large. A writer who does a thousand words a day, most days, for years, ends up with shelves.

The consistency is the whole trick. Motivation comes and goes, and a routine that leans on feeling inspired collapses the first bad week. Pratchett's held up because it never asked how he felt. It asked for the count, and the count was small enough that he could give it even when the day had been rotten.

So the honest answer carries two numbers and a ceiling. Four hundred a day for the man with the office job. A thousand a day for the full-time novelist. And now and then a 6,000-word day when the story was pouring out faster than he could second-guess it. Stretch that across three decades and you land somewhere north of 70 books, from Discworld to the Long Earth novels and the young-adult work.

Put next to the counts other novelists have admitted to, 400 looks almost modest, and that's the lesson in it. Graham Greene famously guarded 500 words a day, and Hemingway hovered near the same. Pratchett's floor was lower and his output was enormous, because a target you can hit on a bad day is a target you actually keep.

That count didn't run on its own. It sat inside a whole working setup: the evening habit, the full-time desk, the six screens he wrote at later on. For the rest of the picture, see the full Terry Pratchett writing routine.

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