Two Thousand Words a Day
Stephen King, by his own account, writes about two thousand words a day. That’s roughly the length of this post. He has done this nearly every day for fifty years, and the result is one of the most prolific output records in modern publishing. The average adult reads at about two hundred words a minute. That makes King’s daily output ten minutes of reading material. One of the most productive writers in history produces, per day, about one-sixtieth of what his reader could consume. That ratio - call it sixty to one, give or take - has always been the underlying economics of text. A writer’s daily output is always tiny compared to a reader’s daily intake. The asymmetry between writing-time and reading-time isn’t a recent development; it is the oldest fact about written language. ...