Pomodoro for fiction. Pick a 15, 25, or 45-minute sprint, hit start, write. The timer chimes when you're done, you log your word count, and the tool tracks WPM and a session history, so you can see whether you're getting faster, and whether your most productive sessions tend to land in the morning or the evening.
Why a sprint beats "writing for an hour"
"Write for an hour" is too vague. Your brain knows it can quietly stretch the start, drift mid-way, and slow-roll the finish. A sprint with a hard end-time fixes all three: the start has urgency, the middle has a deadline pulling forward, the end is non-negotiable.
The other thing sprints do well: lower the activation energy. Promising yourself twenty-five minutes is a much easier yes than I will write today. By the time the timer ends, you've broken the inertia and often keep going.
Sprint lengths and what they're good for
| Length | Best for | Typical output |
|---|---|---|
| 15 min | Warm-ups, busy days, breaking stuck | 250–500 words |
| 25 min | Classic Pomodoro, between meetings, daily habit | 500–1,000 words |
| 45 min | Deep work, novel scenes, sustained drafting | 1,000–1,800 words |
| 60–90 min | Heavy revision, complex scenes, weekend sessions | 1,500–3,000 words |
These ranges assume first-draft writing without heavy editing. If you're revising or composing carefully, expect roughly half these word counts.
How to actually sprint
- Know your starting point. Read the last paragraph from yesterday's session. That's it. Don't edit it. The point is just to remember where you were.
- Set the timer and don't look at it. Watching the clock fragments attention. Trust the chime.
- Don't fix typos. If you typo a word, let it stand. Editorial brain and drafting brain are different; switching costs are real. Fix it in the next pass.
- If you stall, write anything. "I don't know what comes next." Then keep going from there. The point is unbroken motion, not perfect output.
- When the chime rings, stop mid-sentence. Hemingway's trick. Finishing a sentence makes the next start harder. Stopping mid-thought makes it almost impossible not to come back.
What WPM actually tells you
The words-per-minute the timer logs is your writing speed, not your typing speed. Typing speed (mechanical keystrokes) for adult adults is 40–80 wpm. Writing speed (with thinking, planning, sentence-construction) is much lower because the bottleneck isn't your fingers.
Typical writing-speed ranges:
- 5–15 wpm: careful revision, dense academic prose, slow-drafting style
- 15–30 wpm: most fiction first drafts
- 30–50 wpm: fast first-drafters, NaNoWriMo pace, blog posts
- 50–80 wpm: typewriter-era pulp, journalism on deadline, dictation
Your number across many sprints matters more than any single sprint. Tracking it over weeks shows whether you're speeding up (warming into a project) or slowing down (over-thinking, getting tired).
From single sprints to a writing year
The timer on this page records sprints in your browser. That's enough for one session. The harder question (does this many sprints, this often, with this much output, add up to a finished book) needs the long view.
Authorlytica saves a session in 10 seconds, builds the streak across months, projects the finish date based on your real pace, and turns the year into a Writing Wrapped report. The free plan covers all of this for three active projects.