Pomodoro for fiction. Pick a 15, 25, or 45-minute sprint, hit start, write. The timer chimes when you're done and you log your word count. The tool tracks WPM and a session history. Check it after a week and you can see whether you're getting faster, and whether your best sessions tend to happen 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 in view, 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 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 is whether this many sprints, this often, add up to a finished book. That needs the long view.
Authorlytica logs the session, builds the streak across months, projects the finish date based on your actual pace, and turns the year into a Writing Wrapped report showing your best month, your longest streak, and the word counts that matter. The free plan covers all of this for three active projects.