#wordcounts

*heavy breathing*

Give me my FUCKING 1 MILL AO3 OVERALL WORDCOUNT CROWN

I need to write a oneshot this week. Preferably one that is exactly 760 words so I can HIT AN EVEN MILLION.

That's an interesting concept. I looked up Leena Norms' short video, where she said that she can't approach her writing goals by aiming for specific wordcounts, because she doesn't know enough about her abilities yet to guess what a realistic goal is. I like that kind of rational approach. Instead she wants to aim for establishing a habit. This reminds me of @gywo, where you can pledge for a yearly wordcount or a habit.

So, a habit. Like three hours every day. Now, in theory, I think that is one of the best approaches if you want to be a writer (or any kind of creator). It sounds perfect. For certain sorts of persons.

Omg, I'm dying here. Like, I could never, possibly, be that kind of person. I have data about my personality and my way of working of 40+ years, and I can say with utter confidence that I never had and never will have that kind of discipline in my life. That's just... how do you even schedule that? How do you work that into the general chaos of life?

I work three days per week, which already makes me incredibly privileged. And even with two whole days, plus the weekend, I can never guarantee that I can actually write three full hours on any of those days. I have a writing date with a friend once a week and in some weeks, the words I write that afternoon are all I get for that week.

There's a reason why I'm only counting weekly wordcounts. I don't need that anxiety of "oh shit I didn't write today" in my life, but I need some way of proving to the yelling brain that I did indeed write something that week.

I know a lot of writers form a habit of getting up one hour earlier and writing for that one hour before starting the day. That sounds like a great habit and I wish my brain wasn't like cold molasses in the morning that this would work for me.

Here's the thing I keep saying all the time: You have to work with your brain, not against it. You can try all sorts of cool concepts, habits, outlines, rituals, and if one or more work for you, great! If they don't, fuck em and do it another way.

My way of writing time is "whenever". I have a laptop, I have a phone and a bluetooh keyboard. Technologically, I can write anywhere and whenever. Do I, always? No. But I try to grab the opportunities and use them. Would I stop after three hours, no matter what? No way, not when the words flow.

My personal recommendation is the writing date. Find someone for parallel play. They don't have to write, my friend knits and studies while I write, but it makes writing less lonely.

This all went on a bit on a tangent, I think what you actually asked was whether counting hours of writing instead of words is a useful approach. Of course it is! We just chatted about that for the upcoming @the-wip-project. Some writers are editing their works and if you're revising, you can't count words, that doesn't work. And how many times have we all written whole paragraphs, only to delete them later on. Do those words not count?

So yes, counting the time spend on working on your story is a valid approach. I'm sure there's apps for counting these things, possibly even gamefy them (if my duolingo app can give me XP to learn Norwegian, there must also be an app that will remind me to spend time on my story).

It’s funny how your perspective can change over time.

I’m a member of a gameified writing site called 4TheWords, and there, it was pretty normal for people to have goals of 100,000 or 150,000 words just for NaNoWriMo.

So while I do write large wordcounts by the standards of many, it’s nothing to the people who churn out a standard novel and a half each month (I even heard of one person aiming for 200,000 words, though I’m not sure they reached it).

I’ve only been slowing down in the last week. So I’m aiming for 35k this month, or just a bit over. The last few months are definitely not anywhere near normal for me, which is why I’m so sick at the moment. It’s really really easy to think that writing isn’t draining or fatiguing or tiring, because of a lot of reasons (society undermining it as a career, feeling like I should find it easy, thinking ‘it’s just sitting and writing why is that draining’ etc.), but I kind of can’t keep putting off slowing down anymore. Even if I just do it for December, it needs to be done.

I am working on Falling Falling Stars today because I want to, I can just feel how I’m sort of slipping backwards on The Ice Plague. I’m hoping a few more days to just slow down and stuff will help.

Total words written: 31k

Average words per day: 1010

Highest daily count: 1688

Lowest daily count: 0 (it was Christmas, come on! 🎅)

my daily word count goal: 500 words a day

me: okay but thats not that-

We've come full circle and have now done a year of this! Crazy!

June looked like this:

There was a lot of posting in June because I did fedij (masterlist here) (ao3 series here)

Breakdown of this can be found here

But the writing breaks down like this:

Phew! Lots of projects.

Which leaves out year like this:

Higher than we were this time last year despite fedij being less words.

And July is shaping up to be a little busy too as I work on 4 diff writing projects. Though hopefully 2 of those will be finished soon.

YOU CAN FIND A BLANK VERSION OF THE TRACKER I USE FOR THIS HERE IF YOU WANT TO USE IT FOR YOUR OWN WRITING.

Well, the 3K per day goal is (a) in terms of simple mathematics a desired outcome in order to have at least 90K of book done by the end of the month, and (b) as they say in Pirates of the Caribbean – more of a guideline than an actual rule. If events so conspire that I only get 2K done in a day, fine, but I expect myself to make it up over the next day or so.

And of course they have to be the right three thousand words. So… no pressure. :)

That said: 3K words of writing in a given day is what I class as “nonstressful”. Normally I can do it in one session, say between nine in the morning and 1 PM, when I like to break for lunch and the news on RTE if I can. 5K to 7K begins to take more time: I can’t do it between lunch and dinner – have to add on a morning or evening session. I can do 10K per day for some days at a stretch if I absolutely have to, but it doesn’t make me happy (because of the tension of having to do it, not at all because of any quality concerns) and leaves me wrung out. (For those who won’t be able to bear not knowing, my per-day record is a tad shy of 14K. But I rejoice to tell you that one day in twenty-two hours of writing, @petermorwood​  did 15K… the house record to date. He was finishing the last of the Russian fantasy books, as I recall. And his editor said that was some of his best writing ever.)

The medium I’m working in is also an issue. If I do ten pages of screenplay in a day, which word for word is WAY lower than a normal day’s prose wordcount, I’m well pleased with that… though again I can do and have done better when under pressure. When rewriting the Ring miniseries, for example, I routinely did fifteen to twenty pages a day. But that was rewrite, and I had (a) my producer sitting desk-to-desk with me, a friend I very much wanted to please by solving this problem for him, and (b) the satisfaction that on every day on which I successfully fixed the busted pages that were being handed to me, I was really pissing off somebody else in the production chain whose pissing-off I desired more than anything.

Motivation is a wonderful thing. You could call this Duane’s Third Law if you liked: Writing speed is determined by motivation. By which I mean an ever-shifting matrix of internal-world and external-world considerations. When’s the deadline, when’s the REAL deadline, is your editor happy with you, is your publisher happy with you, are the sales staff happy with you, how much trouble will you be in if you miss the deadline, how awful will you feel about yourself if you miss the deadline, how will taking longer than planned over this work affect your business life (i.e., how soon will you starve), how much do you want to tell this story, are you happy with how you’re telling this story, are you happy with your outline, is the story holding water or in the course of execution is it springing leaks at the seams that are going to make you have to stop and patch them or start bailing? (Which means you lose active writing time.)

…And so on. I say nothing of the inevitable existential questions that arise from the depths of the mind during any given workday and can affect the speed of output. What on Earth made me think I could pull this off, don’t be silly, of course I can pull this off, I’ve done it hundreds of times before, okay, tens of times, what’s the word I need here, oh God I can’t think of the word, I’m going senile, oh good Peter doesn’t know the word either, we’re going senile together, why in God’s name do I find that reassuring, does this interaction feel genuine, this sentence is too long, all these sentences are too long, who the fuck do you think you are, Faulkner, is there better science on this issue lately, I think this character may need killing, this chapter is too short, structurally this thing needs to happen later, I want to take a break, if I take a break I’ll lose the pre-lunch impetus, hmm, lunch, there’s a thought…

So you see how it goes. At the end of the day (or even in the middle of it), daily output is a kind of “how long is a piece of string” question. I make a plan and then see what happens to it in the execution – always remembering von Moltke’s sage (and accurate) observation that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. And if I don’t achieve my target one day, I pick myself up and dust myself off and resolve to do better the next day, because… what the hell else can I do? I signed up for this. :)