As of this writing, (March 2026), I've completed five novel length pieces - Three fanfiction, two original. With a little asterisk - we'll get to that. Since the start of 2023 I have produced over one million words of writing. This is partly luck/life circumstances, partly passion/wanting it, and partly training.
Edit 2026/03/24: I recently read the post Writing Advice Crimes by Gretta, and I noticed some things I could do to make this advice suck less, so here's an extra paragraph on that. Firstly, I want to emphasize that my advice is for training prolificness specifically and is no good for getting published; I write stuff so low-brow it's basically unpublishable as far as I know, featuring kink, fluff, and relationship problems between people trying their best. The business side of publishing is almost entirely a mystery to me - I have made a total of ~$30 from all my work to date. I'm assuming that you, the reader, also want to write as a hobby and to train your writing muscles for larger pieces, or because you have something you personally want to express through your work. You can get some reach this way - I have a piece that has over 100k views, which is not shabby for a hobby writer - but you're unlikely to break into the mainstream unless your personal tastes happen to align with whatever cultural moment people are going through.
Epistemic status here is "this is what worked for me personally over my own development as a writer over my lifetime", so N = 1 so far as broader applicability. I'm going to go into a little more detail on why I advise each of the following things as I touch on each one.
I am disabled and have been unemployed for the past five years. I'm surviving on family income and goodwill, right now. This has many downsides, but one thing it does do is give me hours and hours and hours to write in. Sometimes just having a lot of free time is its own reward. This is the dirty little secret that many prolific authors have - they're supported financially by someone else. They might be disabled and supported by their government, a house spouse supported by their partner, or in another similar relationship. You don't produce thousands of words a day without a lot of time spent turning over writing in your head, at least not in my experience.
Your relationships are likely to be strained by you doing so much writing. This is expected from the territory; writing is largely a solitary pursuit if you're the type who needs deep creative control, which many authors do. But having partners that support you and enjoy your work is likely to help a lot. Ideally your partners will also be writers that you can contribute to the works of and have them contribute to your works in turn.
Write stuff you enjoy. If you don't like your own stories you will never succeed at writing them to the finish. You're the only audience you're ever guaranteed, so write the stories you want to see in the world. Get self-indulgent. No, more self-indulgent than that. Write the stuff that's popcorn to you. For me this is fluffy lesbians having lots of sex and hurt/comfort mentorship plots. For other people it might be mind games or action scenes or what have you. The more you want to write it the more energy you'll have to bull through obstacles with.
A note: Fighting through on wanting to be a great writer or wanting praise for your work or the material being important to you for some other personal reason (like it relating to your personal damage or convictions) can help, but ultimately you are going to be sitting with your work for hours of your life, and if it's not something that's kind to you and fun for you to write, you'll suffer for it - and that often means it'll go incomplete. Be kind to yourself. Write what you enjoy.
This works for me because I am an ADD jumble of a writer, who prefers to write character first and then let the long-term plot work itself out from the characters' actions. If structure is more your ally, I recommend instead reading Janice Hardy's Understanding Conflict, or else looking into canned plot structuring material such as Chuubo's Marvellous Wish Granting Engine (Jenna Moran) or Save The Cat Writes A Novel (Jessica Brody).
There are several things you need to train to become prolific as a starting writer. Generally the barriers look like this:
(These are all places I personally got "stuck" for a bit and which I've seen multiple authors struggle to pass.)
The problem here is that as a beginning writer, you're likely to suck at storytelling. This is the hardest period with picking up any new craft - you don't know the basic rules yet, you're still learning how to function, but you have all these ideas for what you're going to create that your output can't possibly live up to.
The secret here is to just start writing something in character. It doesn't have to be a novel or a short story or anything at all complicated, it just has to involve characters and something like a plot that you're participating in. Freeform roleplay is a gateway for many authors I've known because it lightens their load (they only have to write one character, their coauthors produce the other characters' input) and it's enough to get you past the first hurdle, to the point of writing. You can't learn to produce work without actually writing something that looks like a work.
If you're stuck completely, a technique I know from David Morell (who held a symposium in meatspace I went to, to be a subject of a future blog post) is to start writing a letter to yourself explaining why you are stuck. This is magic because it gets you writing and thinking about the problem while writing, and from that point it is a lot easier to keep going and write the actual fiction. For an ADD writer like me who has a lot of trouble with activation energy, these two techniques have worked wonders.
It's important to note that worldbuilding is different from character writing, here - the trouble is that you can generate a lot of setting detail without ever thinking about what the plot or character arc of the piece might be, and it's plot and character arcs that are the meat and potatoes of fiction writing. You have to tell a story, and stories are based on conflict, whether internal or external, that the characters struggle to overcome.
Practicing these techniques repeatedly will get you somewhere eventually. You'll start learning the basic mechanics of how to express characters' emotions and how to steer them in directions you want. If you have a different problem than activation energy, I'd have to know more about your case to see why you're hesitating.
The key thing here is having to write an ending to a piece. Endings exercise different muscles than beginnings and are often harder, because they have to serve as a fitting conclusion to the story so far.
Short stories are what you should be trying to write here. It is okay (even encouraged!) for them to be fanfiction. You just need to write a complete plot arc. For me, it took having a structured writing assignment in a writing course to complete a short story to get me through this one. It's hard to tie all the plot threads together and commit to an ending, so practicing on short pieces is better than ending up trailing off on a larger piece.
This is number two, because it's second in terms of the amount of material you have to produce, but it could wait until after you've produced something novel length without a proper ending. (And does in fact come in that order for some authors, cough cough rothfuss cough cough.)
To some degreee, if you're an ADD writer, you're going to lose some pieces in the middle. Everyone does to some extent, but it'll be more pronounced for you. Try not to let it get you down. You're still training skills by figuring out how to conclude plot arcs and make characters change.
The key here is to not give a damn how trash your output is. I wrote a fifty thousand word "novel" as my first novel and it was an absolute trainwreck of a piece. This would be my sixth novel-length piece if I counted it, but I personally... Don't. Because it's a trainwreck. Just producing fifty thousand words is hard without you having to consider their quality. Ignore quality until you have done something of the right length once, at least.
NaNoWriMo was my savior here. Having a defined number of words to produce per day helped make the task manageable, and having others working on the same goal produced an atmosphere that makes it seem doable. It will take a lot of work but it is possible to do. It took me three tries at NaNoWriMo before one of them worked. Persevere.
If you have trouble coming up with a plot arc and direction at all, questing (writing a story that your readers direct the actions of your main character in, often on a forum such as Sufficient Velocity) is a good intermediate step to take.
This is where that daily writing habit advice starts to come in. You don't have to literally write every day to get work done; it's more that you have to make writing a regular part of your routine such that you come back to it regularly. It takes a lot of hours to produce a lot of work. My personal output is very, very bursty, where I'll have a month where I'll write 50k words and then another month where I'll write a few thousand at most. This is normal for me because I'm ADD. More regularized schedules might work for more planny writers, but personally I do a lot better when I have space to breathe, relax, and shuffle things around.
This involves writing a novel that actually has a plot arc to it that you can complete. It's the hardest item on this list and IMO should only be attempted after you've succeeded at the rest of the items here. I recommend writing fanfiction (more to lean on) and having a regular posting schedule for it (get that daily habit in, have a consequence for failing to write. I personally hate to disappoint my readers, this setup might not work for you as well.) Once you have a fanfiction that's to length you can then move to original work. Having a premise that's popcorn to you will help a lot here, as will doing some research on story templates for plots - I'm fond of the quest arcs from Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine for structuring my plots.
You may want to finish one or two novella length works (~20k words) before tackling something this extended - I personally wrote a pair of novellas before I wrote my first completed original piece of novel length.
Once you've picked up all the subskills, you'll have the ability to turn out perhaps one truly large piece a year, if you're lucky and have a lot of time. This is normal. Training will keep improving your ability to be more prolific, as well as learning details of how to structure plots and stories, but to some extent your ability to produce a lot of work is at this point more dependent on your life circumstances and skills larger than writing itself, like being able to pace yourself properly and take appropriate breaks. (This has been a bugbear for me personally because I tend to throw myself at writing to the point of burnout before being willing to set a plot idea down, at least when I'm doing something I'm more invested in.)
A lot of people try to complete a novel without training any of the subskills first. A novel is a big commitment. You can and should work up to it. Clearing regular time to write is also a big step, which is only going to happen if you enjoy it. So have fun, get messy, make mistakes, and generally follow Ms. Frizzle's life advice, and you'll get somewhere in no time.