L.A. Garnett – Author

I am fascinated by the concept of the words your average person writes in a day. Obviously this differs drastically depending on your job and lifestyle, but bear with me.

I work as an assistant. I spend my 8-4pm hours writing emails, creating calendar events, typing up and distributing meeting notes—it’s a lot of writing, when you take it all into account. I did a quick tally the other day, on a light day, and I think across all my “thank you”s and “are you available”s I wrote about 1000 words. Not to mention the handwritten notes I jotted during a few meetings, or the to-do list I wrote out before I even got to work that morning. I also had a few personal emails to reply to, so that added to the tally—I’d guess at least 1500 non-creative writing. On a slow day!

Honestly, looking at the numbers through a week, it’s no wonder we feel tired when we sit down to write. We’ve already used a lot of mental energy writing—it just wasn’t for ourselves!

There’s a practice of collecting a person’s body of work and assessing it, looking for themes and the evolution of their thoughts and practices. I’d argue that our digitial footprint—all of our emails, social media posts, even texts—are a part of that body of work. It all comes together to form who we are people, and that informs our writing.

It’d be an interesting exercise to keep track of our weekly wordcounts… basically impossible, I think, giving the breadth of that sort of project and the time that individual tracking would take. But maybe I’ll take a week and tally it up—I know I’d be interested seeing the numbers, and seeing how a high-volume work day effects my creative writing in the evening.

If you want to read my currently available work, The Spiraling is available on Kindle Unlimited and for paperback purchase through Amazon and wherever you buy books online. The second book is coming out later this year—catch up before my promotional materials spoil it!

If you subscribe to my blog, you get access to an exclusive bonus chapter! It takes place before The Spiraling, and you can read it in any order. If you’re curious how Tamora ended up the way she did, check it out!