Kia ora!
How are you?
We’ve had an intense week of rain here in Golden Bay, including one day with no internet or cell phone reception! It was very 1980s.
We’ve just nudged over the halfway mark of 2025, and this week I thought I’d remind you what you could achieve by the end of the year, if you can build a routine around your writing.
For us writers, word count is a THING. We don’t talk in pages, we talk in word counts. For a while, the average length of a memoir I was writing, editing or helping someone else write, was around 20,000 words (approx 100 pages, with images).
Lately though, I’ve been working on some longer books, a few 100,000 + ones. We’ve recently published one book that was around 120,000 words long, which equated to 366 pages of a beautiful story with images.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why on earth am I rattling on about wordcounts? Because, I want to ask you – if you were to set a writing goal that you’d love to reach by the end of this year, how many more words would you need to write? Now’s a great time to set yourself a goal, and think about a routine to reach it.
A slow typer can write 600 words in half an hour. Imagine if you committed to half an hour of writing, first thing each morning. Let’s allow for some breaks and thinking time, you could get in around 500 words per day. If you wrote three times per week, you could reach up to 1500 words. In 10 weeks you’d reach 15,000 words. That’s something to be proud of!
And interestingly, if you were to speak your story into a voice recorder, in 20 minutes you could record at least 2000 words. If you told one wee story per day, three days per week, in 10 weeks you’d reach 60,000 words! Also nothing to sneeze at!
Would you like to set a goal that you’d love to reach by the end of 2025? If you would, (and you haven’t yet downloaded this yet) here’s my free Memoir Planner for you. You can print it out and put it on your wall, near where you write, to remind you of your writing goal, your routine, and your ‘why’.
I’d love to see you reaching a place you feel really proud of this year.
If you’re interested in speaking your story into your phone, I have a short workshop brewing called Speech to story that walks you through the process of recording your story and uploading it to a great programme that will instantly transcribe it for you. I’m recording it soon, and it’s for people who don’t consider themselves to be very tech savvy, so it’s very ‘step by step’ and hopefully beginner friendly. I’ll put it into my larger Write Your Memoir course, but you can also buy it separately for $47. Email me to go on the waiting list for it here and you’ll be the first to know when it’s ready.

Write on dear one,

Charlotte x

Your story

I asked you to send in 100 words about a ‘notable character’.
Here’s the first one by Ineke, about her dad. It’s more than 100 words and that’s ok, and I’ve decided to start asking you for 200 words from now on!
Dear Dad,
I need to talk to you. How did you manage to stay afloat in South Africa? A strange country, and you had no job at the start, in 1952. Yet, you persevered and pushed through, making a living for us.
I regret never having the opportunity to ask more questions. Unfortunately, everything was like a closed book regarding your thoughts. The other day, while I was cleaning and unpacking, I found the handwritten purchase agreement for the plot, which Kobie, my older sister, had prepared.
I do know you borrowed the money from Grandpa Zacht. You paid it off monthly, regardless of the hard times we lived in. In 1959, you started building our house. You were born in 1911, and when we moved into our new home in 1960, you were approximately 49 years old.
Other than that, I am still determining how it went. It must have been very stressful. I also now understand why you were always so severe—there was no time for games. Work: Get up at 5 a.m. and don’t return home until 5:30 p.m. You spend all your time on weekends building, all by yourself. We moved in when the living room, kitchen and dining room were finished. The three bedrooms still needed to be built.

Four ways I can help you write your story

Email me to go on the waiting list: charlottesquirecoms@gmail.com