It looks as if the open mic week was a resounding success, so we’ll repeat it again in about six weeks. Meanwhile, I’ve spent some of the last week or so listening to writing podcasts while I do some much-needed spring cleaning. And naturally, one of them annoyed me.
This one, like many of them, began with a series of recommendations that sounded quite reasonable on the surface: know what you’re trying to do, make it specific, and then break it down so you know what you need to do in order to achieve it. Then came the example: If you want to write a novel, figure out how long and when you want to have it finished. Say, you want to write a 100,000 word novel in the next ten months. Then break it down in parts: 100,000 words in ten months is ten thousand words per month; at four weeks per month, that’s 2,500 words per week, or 357 words per day. Then all you have to do is follow your plan, and voila! Ten months later you have your novel.
The main problem with this is that different people have different working rhythms. There’s a nod to this – the podcaster noted that if you need to take weekends off for some reason, you can still get to your 2500 words per week by writing 500 words per day instead of 357 – but there was no recognition that many writers’ work rhythms aren’t that regular or predictable.
I know some burst writers who can crank out 10,000 words in, respectively, a day, three days, and a week, and then they have to stop and recharge. Telling any of them to stop at 300, 500, or even 1000 words and pick up from there the next day throws them completely off. So does telling them they have to sit down the day after their 10,000-word burst and write another 300 words. Working from a daily word-count quota would pretty much guarantee that these folks would take years to finish anything, assuming they didn’t give up entirely somewhere along the way.
Even plodders have occasional bursts of productivity when a chapter or a scene seems to write itself. In my experience, these are completely unpredictable – a gift from the writing gods – and therefore can’t be factored into a schedule. (They also tempt one into unwise calculations – “Hey, I wrote 5,000 words yesterday! If I keep that up, I can finish the last 75,000 words in two weeks!” – which never, ever work out that way. Never.)
The other main problem with a daily word-count quota is that following a word count schedule requires tracking one’s daily word count. This means that every day, the writer is faced with evidence of their productivity (or lack thereof) as measured by word count and how it compares to their goal word count for that day. Lots of writers find this soul-crushing rather than motivating.
In addition, there are a lot of people who treat a word-count quota as something that requires either absolute compliance, or absolute defiance. The compliant ones get bent out of shape if they wrote 353 words instead of the 357 the schedule calls for; the defiant ones start skipping work sessions and heading for the beach as a way of thumbing their nose at their schedule.
Of course, there are also writers who find a daily quote – whether it’s words, pages, or hours spend in front of the keyboard – incredibly helpful. And I know a couple of writers who got a lot of useful information out of tracking their productivity over time.
Among the things they discovered: That they get more words written per day if they write at X time (for one it was first thing in the morning; for another, anytime after noon; for a third, any time after midnight). That they get more words written at certain times of the year (spring, fall). That there is a really consistent and predictable rhythm to their production, whether that means they plod through their beginnings, crawl through their middles, and sail through their endings; sweep through their first drafts and plod through revisions; or consistently write chapters in the same pattern of daily word-count [300-500-200-100-600-done] and then produce nothing for a week until they start the next chapter. All of them found this information very useful when it came to planning and evaluating how much work they could reasonably get done in a given time period.
That is the real use of tracking your productivity – not to beat yourself up for not meeting some arbitrary standard of word-production, but to understand how you work so you don’t feel guilty for following your natural rhythm of production. When a writer has ever-increasing evidence that they average 500 words a day, whether they’re burst-writing or plodding, they can look at a 5,000 word day and confidently predict that they’re going to get zero to 100 words-per-day for the next ten to fifteen days, until the word count averages out. Knowing that in advance means they’re less likely to get caught in the “But I wrote 5,000 words in a day; why can’t I keep doing that?” trap.
Tracking word count, hours spend writing, stories-per-year, or any other writing metric can be a wake-up call for would-be writers whose hard numbers show that they’re spending more time hanging out with “other writers” at conventions than they’re spending at the keyboard. Unfortunately, it can also be deeply discouraging for some writers, especially the ones who have impossibly high standards for what they think they should be able to produce. Knowing the facts about one’s own personal productivity rhythm is only helpful if one uses that information wisely, which means not beating oneself up because one’s actual production isn’t like the movie montage with the pages piling up behind the inspired writer steadily and assiduously typing away.
When I was living in Albany (California), I *used* to get up at five a.m. and write for an hour before getting dressed, making breakfast, getting people off to school and work, et cetera. If it wasn’t too cold out, I could open the French doors and listen to Cordonices Creek gurgling past the house, about twenty feet away. It was a good time, and I could count on getting several (handwritten) pages done each morning.
I can’t do that any more. I’m old and the brain runs more slowly, and although I have pasted on the edge of my monitor a maxim Pat used to use as a .sig on USENET, “Have you written your page today?” (followed by a maxim of Peter Beagle’s: “Think, schmuck!”) whether I get anything written in a given day depends on whether an idea has taken shape, and whether I have the necessary real-world information.
Back when I lived in Albany and was working at UC Berkeley, I had access to the University’s many libraries, and could find out almost anything I needed. Now, although I do have the Web, I can’t just stroll along the bookshelves and pick up any book whose spine looks interesting and leaf trough it to see if I want it. There is no search engine that can match the Mark 1 eyeball.
For instance: I have just brought my characters to Alexandria in 92 BCE (and I need to figure out what that is in AUC and the count of Olympiads, but that can wait). They’re going to visit the fabled Library of Alexandria. I have been searching this site and that for three days, and have reached the tentative that nobody knows what the Library buildings looked like, nor does anybody other than me seem to care.
I have found some bits on Greek and Egyptian temples, which were basically forests of pillars, close enough together that a stone beam could be laid across two pillars and not break under its own weight.
I also know that a temple would be surrounded by a temenos (sacred area) containing many buildings dedicated to administration, storage, housing for staff, and everything else you’d need for a good-sized city. But what did those buildings look like?
I finally found a reconstruction of some Greek buildings, part of a palace apparently, looking very much like the cloister of a medieval monastery: one-story buildings forming a square, with a porch running around the inside edges, and door on the inner walls facing a lawn and perhaps a central statue or fountain. This I can deal with–and it solves the question of how scholars would be able to read the books stored in the Library; they would check one or several out and come into the porch to read by sunlight. Glass-enclosed candle-lanterns date back into antiquity, and library staff would go into the storage rooms to find the book the scholar wanted and bring it out for him.
And I couldn’t write a flipping word till I found all this out.
Now I get to figure out how they can access the books they want, which are treatises on magic, without telling the librarian that. Instead, they’re going to begin by studying the Egyptian language. This should take them most of the winter, which should give me time enough to figure out when, and under what circumstances, they overhear their antagonist’s minion trying to explain to his boss how he lost an important scrap of papyrus.
The writing advice referenced falls apart for me on the first step: “know what you’re trying to do… Say you want to write a 100,000 word novel”.
For me, the work determines its length. I never know when I start writing whether it’s going to turn into a short-short or a multi-volume epic. Those people who says things like “I need another 12,500 words to finish” seem to me to be evoking some dark magic, predicting what I find impossible to predict.
Me, too.
I can guess from the outline, but some outlines expand more than others.
Oddly enough if I’ve written half the outline and it’s 12,500 words, it’s very likely to be 12,500 more words.
Agreed! By now, I know the typical overall shape of my novels’ and novellas’ daily-progress-versus-time plot – one or two scenes per day at the beginning, followed by annoyingly incremental sporadic progress for a few weeks or months or years, and finishing with serious burst-writing sessions (9,000 words a day, easily, most of which need extensive editing afterwards) – but I never know how long the story wants to be until extremely close to the end. (That holds true even for Nanowrimo – I spent four Novembers working on a story that wanted to be a ~200,000-word novel, thank you, not a little 50,000-word novella.)
(And my awareness of the progress-versus-time plot isn’t helpful for much except vague ~reassurance – “Yep, the middle of this story is taking forever to write, because you have less time and brainpower and authorial freedom than you did when you started the story, and you don’t yet have the need-to-write-all-of-these-dramatic-scenes-NOW! impetus that you’ll probably have near the end of the story. Yep, this usually happens. Yep, if you get through the middle of the story, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll somehow write the last several dozen thousand words in a week or two. If you’re very lucky, you’ll know when you’re approaching that point and will be able to start that process when you have more free time than usual. If you’re not lucky, you’re going to be carefully keeping your mouth shut about this accomplishment around everyone who expected academic work from you during those weeks. Either way, the last few chapters are going to need some serious editing.”)
Tracking word count, hours spend writing, stories-per-year, or any other writing metric can be a wake-up call for would-be writers
That’s its main use for me; it keeps me honest. (Both negatively and positively: I find it’s just as easy for me to think I’ve barely been writing at all when I’ve actually been making decent progress, as it is to think I’ve been really cranking it out when the numbers, er, do not support this.) Mind you, I usually only total it up once a month, so it’s a general overview rather than an obsessive daily check.
And even then, while tracking word count mostly works for me, there’s been a time or two when it hasn’t — in fact, it’s stopped me cold. You’ve got to go with what works for you, even if, frustratingly, it’s the exact opposite of what worked last month. ;-P
(The most useful practical information I ever got from it was that my productivity was being tanked by my Horrible Ex-Writers Group ™ — my word count plummeted for a week after every meeting, and only gradually crept up again.)
My only other reaction to that podcast is a sort of visceral horror at the idea of writing an entire novel in daily evenly-sized chunks. I am neither a burst writer nor a plodder, and I’ve long since established that a fixed, regular schedule absolutely does not work for me. Trying to write every day makes my brain seize up in very short order.
I always wondered …
How do you know how many words you’ve written?
On a computer, before and after counts.
Long hand? I can’t even figure out where I started, often, so I can’t even go by “250 words a page.”
LOL! My latest short story is still sitting in longhand ink on paper, so I have only the vaguest of guesses as to its word count. I’ll find out when I finally type it into the computer.
Tracking makes sense. Setting goals you can’t meet can’t be as productive as setting ones you can.
I’ve never done a word count and don’t intend to. I’m a burst writer and that burst depends on many factors–am I too stressed to write? Not stressed enough? Do I know what’s happening next in my story generally AND specifically? If not, I have to stop and figure that out. Then also, it depends on what phase of the process I’m in. Outline? First draft? Later draft but still inserting new scenes? Pure revision? My bursts of productivity can last weeks, or a day. And then maybe I’m too busy to write, or too mentally tired and can’t think my way through things. It all depends.
As for planning the length of the book out beforehand, I’ve no idea what length my work will be until it’s done. Not just the first draft done, but done-done. I keep finding threads in my story I haven’t given enough attention to and add new scenes, or haven’t properly foreshadowed and insert bits of dialog or what have you into the middle of an existing scene, or maybe there’s a thread I haven’t properly tied off and need to add that in somewhere.
My writing process is chaos, but it works for me.
I track time, in a spreadsheet, with a column for a short description of what I actually worked on. I definitely believe in writing when the inspiration strikes, but I believe that it is much more likely to do so when I open the document and remember what problems I’m currently working on, on a regular basis.
When I tracked word count the quality got so bad that I became extremely discouraged.
“Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.”
―Madeleine L’Engle