Tracking Word Count

Here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: Want to Write Faster? How Tracking Your Word Count Can Boost Your Productivity

I personally find this to be true. Or, that’s not exactly correct. I don’t have any clear idea whether tracking word count boosts my productivity. I find it motivating to watch the words pile up. Until I reach a tipping point where a specific book becomes ridiculously over-long, and then, in a way, it’s demotivating. It helps to have proactively acknowledged that a book is likely to go long; that constitutes permission to not fret about it, I guess, until the thing goes VASTLY over the intended length, and then I start fretting about it anyway.

Anyway, what does this post say about this, other than declaring that tracking word count can be motivating? (I’m assuming it says that.)

A) It encourages habit formation.

This is the “motivation” thing right here. The author of this post is drawing a direct line between motivation and building a habit of working on your novel every day.

B) It teaches you about yourself.

Hmm, what could this mean? Ah: If you jot down things like the time of day you were working, your location, and any other relevant information, you can look for patterns in your productivity levels. Well, I sort of feel that’s pretty darned obvious without jotting down notes. You’re right there in your very own head, doing the actual writing your very own self. How can you possibly fail to know that you concentrate better at 5:00 AM than 3:00 PM, or that the tots are in bed at 9:00 PM, not 9:00 AM? This is something that surely everyone has already got figured out?

Well, apparently the author of this post figured that sort of thing out because she took notes about it. That seems strange, but who knows, maybe it’s common for people not to notice when they are most productive and I simply haven’t ever noticed.

C) It makes the idea of writing a book feel more manageable.

If you thought about writing a book not as having to write 75,000 words, but having to write 500 words a day for 150 days? That’s only five months! That feels a lot more achievable, doesn’t it?

I agree that this can be helpful. I have personally pointed out to a few people that ONE page a day = a complete novel by the end of the year, and that this doesn’t have to be one page every single day, just an average of one page per day, that three pages three times a week would overshoot this average, that seven pages on Sunday would do it, whatever fit into their schedule. I mean busy people with kids and jobs and lives. At least a couple people hadn’t thought about it that way and did say it sounded more doable if they thought “one page a day” instead of “a book.”

D) It takes the stress out of deadlines.

Nothing can take the stress out of deadlines. BUT FINE, it’s true that if you can SEE you are on track to make a deadline, that’s surely less stressful than if you have no idea. On the other hand, I bet if you can SEE you are obviously going to miss a deadline, that is not helpful in the stress management department.

Back when I was writing to real deadlines, for traditional publishing, I used to say, “All right, so let’s assume this book will go to 140,000 words and then I’ll need to trim it back and revise. The deadline is in 90 days, so that’s 1600 words per day, more or less, so I’ll aim for 2000 words per day minimum and that should give me a buffer of 20 days or so in which to do basic revision.” And this worked fine. For one book I wasn’t enjoying, I would literally hit the 2000 words for a day and quit right then, even in the middle of the sentence, but by golly I turned that book in on time.

Many people who track this way will also set mini goals for themselves with a reward attached, like treating themselves to a new book or a dinner out for every 25,000 words they write, which adds another layer of motivation. What a good excuse for a treat. I should do that. Why not smaller achievements? One piece of chocolate per 500 words, say.

Also, I should promise myself a serious reward for every 10,000 words I cut when I’m trying to trim a book back to something more sensible, and have I mentioned that the Tano book I’m working on now just went over 180,000 words? Which I expected and so I’m not tearing out my hair about it, but I’m going to need to cut it back.. WHICH IS FINE. My guess a long time ago was that this book was going to go over 200,000 words in draft, and it will, and that is FINE.

E) It can improve your book’s pacing.

Really? How?

If your chapters tend to be around 3,000 words but you notice that chapter 7 is only 1,200 and chapter 18 is 9,000, this might tell you that the former could feel rushed and needs more development, while the latter slogs on and could benefit from some editing.

I guess? I don’t think that works for me. If I notice that chapters are extra short or long, I usually move the chapter breaks. But sometimes I really want the chapter breaks where I have them, and that’s fine too. There’s no great rule that chapters all have to be the same length, and for me, I don’t think chapter length has anything to do with pacing.

Except that as a general rule, shorter chapters mean a book will feel faster paced to the reader, which my Random House editor, Michelle Frey, pointed out to me many years ago when she asked me to rechaptinate some book or other so that the chapters would be about 10 pages long instead of about 20 pages long. I’ve paid attention to that ever since.

Right now, when I’m thinking about cutting this Tano book, I’m not thinking of trimming within chapters because they are long. I am thinking that when I trim within chapters, they will become shorter, so if a chapter goes to 35 pages right now, that’s probably not the final length and therefore I do not need to think about exactly where I want chapter breaks at this time. Finalizing chapter breaks is something I do at the end, especially if there’s a single pov protagonist all the way through the entire story.

All right, think the post linked above is fine as far as it goes. Here is another post on this topic: On Writing Stress and Silver Linings: Why Daily Word Counting Isn’t a Good Strategy for Everyone.

My writing style is not amenable to these sorts of daily word count challenges. Don’t get me wrong. I love to cheer on my friends as they report their counts. I’m happy that this works for them. However, it doesn’t always work for me. I tend to write and revise simultaneously (something the NaNoWriMo experts specifically advise against). But as I mentioned above, I am really a pantser at heart and so I often discover new twists in my story that I didn’t know about when I wrote my “outline.” I often go back and layer in shiny new things as I draft. I often go back and do what some of my friends describe as “tinkering” with various elements of the story. As a result, I am a very pokey writer.

And another: Why Word Count Goals Can Be Destructive

When I started writing my medieval epic Behold the Dawn, I decided word count goals might be a helpful aid. My goal was to write 800 words every day—or approximately one page. It was a count that fit well within my already established productivity level, so I knew I could handle it without a problem. No doubt it would be satisfying to jot my word-count total in my writing journal every day—and watch the total count compound over time.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead of watching my fingers flying over the keyboard, hammering word after hundreds of words into my manuscript, I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time watching my word count instead. Am I there yet? Have I reached 800 words? Am I even halfway there? Between the ticking clock and the blinking cursor, my word count ended up severely squashed. Eight hundred words a day was no longer an easy accomplishment; it was an enemy to be conquered.

I can very easily see how that might happen, and the reason this is VERY easy to imagine is … remember I said a minute ago that I once wrote a book to a fairly tight deadline and literally quit in the middle of a sentence when I reached the necessary wordcount for the day? Yep, that was a lot like this. Grimly watching the wordcount go up was not fun. It got the job done, I think it was probably helpful and possibly essential, but I sure didn’t enjoy it.

The author of this post adds: I prefer to force myself to sit down at the computer for a set amount of time every day (two hours in my case) and let the scenes and characters dictate the word count. Some days my word count barely scratches 400, but, with the necessity of reaching a set goal no longer threatening me, I’ve found that the words tend to flow and most days I clock in far beyond my original goal of 800 words.

Which is all very well, but “force” here does make the whole thing sound just as unpleasant to me.

Even though I know when I am most productive — from 5:00 AM to 10:00 AM, and then possibly another hour in the evening, but not too late, like about 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM — I hate to think of HAVING to sit down and get work done from some hour to some other hour. For me, that sounds unpleasant, even though when I’ll be home all day and the weather is too awful to walk the dogs and nothing else is going on, and I’m enjoying myself but I’m not obsessed, then I usually do in fact work according to this schedule. But I wouldn’t regiment it, and if I wanted to walk the dogs at dawn (which is my summer schedule) and then make crepes for breakfast and not touch my laptop until 8:00 AM, that would be fine and I wouldn’t feel guilty about that.

Too late to do that today, though. You know what, maybe I’ll make spinach and cheese crepes for supper.

Meanwhile! I also JUST tripped over yet another blog post about this topic, this time at Writer Unboxed: When Word Count is the Enemy

Focusing on word count exclusively as a measure of progress while you’re drafting can definitely have its downsides. Here are three:

A) It can encourage the wrong kind of progress. 

[T]aking a wrong turn part way through the draft and then feeling like you can’t turn back is pretty dire. Progress in the wrong direction isn’t progress at all.

It sure is. I should have thought of that, because I do think that’s a risk.

B) It can discourage other–just as useful–kinds of progress. 

If you’re fixated on increasing your word count, there’s a very good chance that you’re not doing the other things necessary to improve your book.

Another good point.

C) It can backfire, bringing progress to a halt. 

And this is back at the “it just doesn’t work for me” problem. And the bottom line is: everybody is different, and you have to find a method that works for you, plus notice and accept when other methods don’t work for you. And possibly accommodate the situation when something that worked for one project doesn’t work for a different project, because I think that can happen too.