As a matter of fact it should hold especially for novels and fiction. I hate it when I have to read 600 pages to reach the end of a book that could very well be written in 400. Most novels my dad has in his library dating back a few decades were between 250 and 350 pages. Nowadays they’re 50% bigger and the trend keeps going. War and Peace was 1.200 pages long and now the average fiction trilogy is way beyond that.

As both a novel writer and blogger, I actually recommend going for sheer word count first, but still editing vigorously afterward. I find it much easier to edit after I've dumped everything from my brain.

Case in point: I only reached this concise comment after drafting two other, much longer versions of it.

Yes and no, it's more nuanced than that. An analogy would be that LoC is not a great way to judge the quality of a program, but a good developer will produce millions of lines of code in many different applications before they master their craft.

What hitting a daily word count does is force you to produce something even when you don't think you have anything to say. Or more importantly, when you are stuck and have to painfully work through how to express a tough idea. 250 is quite low for a daily target, honestly.

That said, blind word production obviously doesn't do much unless you're going back and fearlessly editing your work, identifying what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong.

I would say. Write as simple as possible but not simpler.

This is one of the reasons why I love the draft (draftin.com) writer: you can track both words added and removed words, so refactoring your writing causes your score to go up that much faster than just writing.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so instead I wrote a long one."