I had decided not to give a serious opinion in this thread anymore. Since the game took a u-turn towards parodic territory, I think it's only proper to do the same. But I'm gonna make an exception today.
Look, your statements on writing, pace, and production standards are incredibly shortsighted, to say the least. Firstly, there are no fixed writing standards. There are hundreds of genres and an unlimited number of writers. And each of the latter is different in terms of style, goals, and overall performance. Trying to set a minimum daily word count is akin to establishing how many hours one person needs to spend studying in order to pass an exam. Well, it depends on the exam, the subject, and the person.
The thing is the conditions that, according to you, guarantee a solid production are not even right. Not every writer starts working on a piece of fiction with a "plot" in his/her mind. In fact, there are literary movements that specifically seek to avoid plot-driven stories (Sherwood Anderson went as far as to call it "the poison plot"). Try to label and analyse James Joyce basing your analysis on plot, and you'll feel as puzzled as a fisherman trying to cast a net in the desert.
George R.R. Martin —and perhaps it is really appropriate to mention his case when we are talking about writers' production
— divides writers into two categories, engineers and gardeners. It's perhaps a bit simplistic, but I think it's interesting and works for a considerable number of fiction writers. If you are a gardener, which Martin is, you only start with the "seed" of a story and get to see what it really is as you go. That kind of writer is bound to a long journey, full of twists, pleasant and unpleasant surprises. You might know where you want to go, but you don't have many clues as to how you'll get there. As a result, trying to provide a fixed daily production is almost impossible, since you will have to fix problems that you didn't even know existed, and (probably) that will entail rewriting entire portions of your work. And if you try to force yourself into getting X number of words, you'll only be buying tickets for the big prize, a yummy writer's block. Trust me; I'm a gardener.I don't know if coding is more difficult than writing; I never tried to do the former. What I know is that writing (at least, good writing) is not easy and cannot be produced as if you were working in a fast food production facility. As a poet from my country famously said about love, "whoever has tasted it knows". As a final note, I would add that Stephen King, one of the most prolific writers ever, is usually able to write some 2,000 words per day. And if this guy needs to "develop his craft", we all do.
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