I’m thinking, again, about goals, and I’d like to get some input from you if you have a second. So here’s the thing: I think goals are extremely important. I’ve talked about this before (in my old blog). I know every writer has his or her own process, but I think it’s the writers who have worked out when and how often they should write (even if they don’t always stick to it) that end up becoming the most successful. Even though writing is rewarding, even though it’s fun and we do it because we enjoy it, the truth is, many of us wouldn’t do it anywhere near enough if we didn’t force ourselves to.

But how much is enough? That’s the real question. How much does a writer need to write per day, or per week, or per month, per year? There isn’t any set in stone answer to that question—the answer, of course, will vary from writer to writer, case to case. And that, I think, is where the trouble arises. Since there can be no concrete commandment—thou shalt write for at least two hours a day—many writers, I believe, at least at the early stages of their careers, struggle with the issue of how much they should be writing.

Some writers err on the side of overdoing it, buying into the idea that if you want writing to be your job, you should treat it like a job and write for eight hours a day. These people lock themselves away from the rest of the world and push their brains to the breaking point, and they end up having very little to write about because part of writing must come from other things—from reading, from interacting with other people, from having genuine experiences that can inform your texts.

Others, though, go to the opposite extreme, seeing writing as an art and therefore something that you must be inspired to do. These people rarely write at all. They may get lucky and pump out something good on the occasion that they actually produce anything at all, but it doesn’t matter—they don’t produce enough work to ever be very successful.

For those of us who would prefer to fall somewhere in the middle of the writing spectrum, the question remains: how much is enough? How much should we be writing?

I’ve often talked about how I have the ultimate goal (partially, I’ll admit, inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule from Outliers) of writing for an average of three hours a day. I was able to hit that goal for months at a time in grad school, although I was never able to keep it up for an entire year, and, after I graduated and entered into the real world of teaching three or four classes at a time, I’ve been struggling to keep up with an hour a day average. For the past couple of months, though, I’ve easily been logging an average of an hour a day, and I’ve decided it’s time to push myself a bit harder.

So here’s what I want to know from you: what’s your writing goal? How often do you write and how much do you push yourself to produce? How do you gauge your activity (weekly? monthly?), and do you log time or words? Let’s all pool our experiences, okay? I want to hear from you.