And remember to stop while you are still going good.

Ernest Hemingway on Writing (book)

Ernest Hemingway said this was his most important advice:

And remember to stop while you are still going good. That keeps it moving instead of having it die whether you go on and write yourself out. When you do that you find that the next day you are pooped and can’t go on.
Ernest Hemingway on Writing, p.45.

And he was speaking from experience, he went through a stage of getting up and writing from 2am till dawn producing 1000-2000 words a day, but started to feel ‘the real old melancholia’.

So he got back on his boat and found:

It is better to produce half as much, get plenty of exercise and not go crazy. (p. 56)

Hemingway found that about 500 good words a day was a pace he, like most people, could maintain.

That didn’t mean he thought once he’d written his 400-600 good words, he was done with them. He liked to write in pencil for his first draft so that he had plenty of chances to adjust and improve it.

My favorite “trick” is to stop writing at a point where I know that I can pick up easily the next day. I’ll stop in mid-paragraph, often in midsentence. It makes getting out of bed so much easier, because I know that all I’ll have to do to be productive is complete the sentence. And by then I’ll be seated at my desk, coffee and Oreo cookie at hand, the morning’s inertia overcome. There’s an added advantage: The human brain hates incomplete sentences. All night my mind will have secretly worked on the passage and likely mapped out the remainder of the page, even the chapter, while simultaneously sending me on a dinner date with Cate Blanchett.

ERIK LARSON