Have you ever dreamed of writing a novel? Or of seeing your name in print? This fall, your dreams can come true. Join thousands of writers from all over the globe for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and spend your November in a slightly frantic, coffee-induced haze of insanity, writing a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days.
If you have never taken part before, you might be wondering whether you read that right. We bet you did, but go ahead and read it again.
Fifty thousand words. Thirty days. One novel.
Whether you are a NaNoWriMo veteran or you have only just discovered this genius-bordering-on-crazy writing challenge, this NaNoWriMo calculator is for you. It is a tool for Wrimos, so you can indulge in a self-esteem boost while looking at your shiny stats — or run an "expectations vs. reality" check. It is your call.
Do not like stats? Come on. All Wrimos like stats, especially when they are ahead of schedule.
What Is NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is a writing challenge. Every November, thousands of writers from all around the world commit to writing 50,000 words of their own prose in a month. Participants are affectionately known as Wrimos.
How much text is that, exactly? Some famous novels with a similar word count include:
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — 46,118 words;
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — 46,333 words;
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — 50,061 words; and
- The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks — 52,000 words.
In 2017, NaNoWriMo had over 400 thousand participants. All these people form an incredible, one-of-a-kind support system that makes it very hard not to enjoy the challenge. After all, everyone is in it together.
Why Use a NaNoWriMo Calculator?
It should come as no surprise that if you are struggling to write that much in a single month, you need a way to find out how well you are doing. This calculator is a fun expansion of the usual word-count graph, and it shows you several things a plain progress bar cannot:
- The time you spend writing. It is nice to say you wrote a novel in a month, but saying you wrote it in 56 hours gives you far better bragging rights.
- A predicted finish date. At your current pace, when does the novel actually get finished? Sometimes the answer is November 30. Sometimes it is May 14, 2039.
- How far ahead or behind par you are, in words and in days.
- How long your manuscript is on paper — in standard manuscript pages, and how tall the printed stack would be.
- A fully custom challenge. Want 30,000 words in two weeks, or 80,000 over a summer? Change the goal and the dates and the whole calculation follows.
How to Use the NaNoWriMo Calculator
The calculator is divided into four sections, each giving you insight into a different aspect of the challenge.
- Goal setting. Define how many words you want to write and choose a deadline. The defaults are 50,000 words across November 1–30, but you can adjust both as you see fit. From these the calculator derives your daily par — the 1,667 words a day that classic NaNoWriMo is famous for.
- Your progress until now. A quick mid-November reality check: how far along am I? Enter today's date and the total number of words written so far. You get your predicted finish date and the percentage of your novel that is ready.
- Are you on track? This section plans the rest of the month for you: how many words and how many days you have left, and how much you need to write every day to finish on time — both counting today and assuming you take today off.
- How much time do you need? This recalculates the words into hours of furious typing. Provide your writing speed in words per minute (wpm). The default of 15 wpm is the equivalent of 900 words per hour; if you write by hand, or if you have recently won the typing speed Olympics, your value will be different.
Optionally, add the price of a cup of coffee and the price of printing one page, pick a currency — USD, RUB (₽), EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, JPY, CNY, BRL, MXN, INR or KRW — and the calculator will tell you what your novel costs to fuel and to print.
American and Metric Manuscript Standards
"How many pages is that?" has two legitimate answers, and they are not the same number. The calculator supports both and always shows them side by side.
- American (US publishing). A standard manuscript page is 250 words, typed double-spaced in a 12-point monospaced font on US Letter paper (8.5 × 11 in) with 1-inch margins. Page counts are driven by words. A 50,000-word novel is 200 standard pages.
- Metric (European). A standard page, known in German as a Normseite, is 1,800 characters including spaces — 30 lines of 60 characters — on A4 paper (210 × 297 mm). Page counts are driven by characters, which is why the calculator asks for your average characters per word (6.1 is a good default for English prose: about 5.1 letters plus a space).
The system you select also decides which page count is used for the printed stack height, the paper weight and the printing cost.
I'm Falling Behind, Help!
Did the calculator gleefully inform you that your predicted finish date is May 14, 2039? Or are you just experiencing the notorious Week 3 Syndrome? Relax — the arithmetic is on your side more often than it feels.
- Look at the catch-up number, not the total. Being 6,000 words behind sounds fatal. Spread over the ten days you have left, it is 600 extra words a day — about 40 minutes at 15 wpm. The calculator does that division for you.
- Try word sprints. Set a timer for 20 minutes and write without stopping or editing. Two sprints usually beat a whole evening of staring at the page.
- Turn off your inner editor. November is for drafting, not polishing. You cannot revise a page that does not exist.
- Skip ahead. Stuck on a scene? Write the one you actually want to write and leave a note in brackets. Nobody will check the order in which you wrote it.
- Raise the stakes on the page. Bored of your story? So is the reader. Break something, kill someone, or drop a stranger into the room.
- Recalculate honestly. If life happened and 50,000 is out of reach, lower the goal in the calculator and finish that. A completed 30,000-word draft beats an abandoned 50,000-word one.
NaNoWriMo Is Over. What Now?
Whether you crossed 50,000 words or stopped at 12,000, you have more words than you had on October 31, and that was always the real point.
- Let it rest. Give the draft a few weeks in a drawer before you read it. Distance is the cheapest editing tool there is.
- Finish the story if the story is not finished. 50,000 words is a short novel; many drafts need another 20,000–40,000 to reach an ending. Set a new goal and new dates in the calculator and keep going at a saner pace.
- Revise deliberately. Structure first, scenes second, sentences last. Rewriting a beautiful sentence you later cut is wasted effort.
- Work out your real writing speed. You now have a month of data. Divide your words by the hours you actually spent and put that number back into the calculator — your next project's forecast will be far more accurate.
- Keep the habit. Even 300 words a day is another 110,000 words a year. Use the calculator with a one-year window to see it.
How the Numbers Are Calculated
Daily par — the pace that finishes exactly on the deadline:
Daily par = Word goal ÷ Total days — for example, 50,000 ÷ 30 = 1,667 words per day.
Words needed per day from here, counting today as a day you can still write on:
Needed per day = Words remaining ÷ Days left (including today)
Predicted finish date, based on the pace you have actually kept so far:
Pace = Words written ÷ Days elapsed, then Finish = Start date + ⌈Goal ÷ Pace⌉ − 1 days
Writing time, from your words-per-minute rate:
Hours = Word goal ÷ (wpm × 60) — at 15 wpm, 50,000 words is about 55 hours 33 minutes.
FAQs
How many words a day is NaNoWriMo?
1,667 words a day — 50,000 ÷ 30, rounded up. Hit that every day and you finish on November 30 with 50,010 words.
How long does it take to write 50,000 words?
It depends entirely on your typing and thinking speed. At 15 wpm — a realistic composing pace, not a copy-typing pace — it is about 55.5 hours, or a little under two hours a day for a month. At 40 wpm it drops to under 21 hours; writing longhand at 8 wpm it rises to over 104 hours.
What is a realistic words-per-minute rate for drafting?
Copy-typing speeds (50–80 wpm) are not the right benchmark, because composing prose means thinking as well as typing. Most writers draft at 10–25 wpm over a full session. Time one honest hour of writing, divide the words by 60, and use that.
Does the calculator count today as a day I can still write?
Yes, and it shows both figures so there is no ambiguity: days left including today and days left after today. The headline "words per day needed" uses the first; the second tells you what happens if you take today off.
Why does it say my predicted finish date is years away?
Because it extrapolates the pace you have actually kept, not the pace you intend to keep. Write 500 words in the first ten days and the honest projection is 1,000 days. Ten good days will move that date back into November very quickly — the prediction is a mirror, not a prophecy.
Do I have to start on November 1?
No. Set any start date, any end date and any word goal. Camp NaNoWriMo runs in April and July, and plenty of writers run private challenges — the calculator does not care which month you pick.
How many pages is 50,000 words?
200 standard manuscript pages in the American system (250 words per page). In the metric system it is roughly 170 standard pages (1,800 characters each, at 6.1 characters per word). Printed as a trade paperback at about 300 words per page, it is around 167 book pages.
Do words I delete still count?
Officially, your validated word count is whatever is in your manuscript at the end — deletions reduce it. Enter your current total, not your cumulative typing. If you want the "how much did I actually type" number, put that in instead and read the hours figure.