The creativity-nourishing qualities of spreadsheets (I swear)
Hello again!
I write to you from the darkness, but you're probably reading this in the darkness if you're in the northern hemisphere, so I suppose that suits. I dislike how short the days are at this time of year, but I also just... stay up as late as I always do, so really, I'm playing myself. In the world of writerly things, I switched from mostly writing to mostly editing about a month and a half ago. One novel is now firmly in second-draft territory, and I'm spending the rest of the LWH 100 Days project doing the post-it-driven revision method I learned from a class with Cari Luna on the novel I finished during last year's NaNoWriMo.
It's different, recording progress during edit-heavy times. There aren't any super-pleasing methods like "wrote 3,000 words" to record. I take it as a good sign, however, that I miss making those nice, detailed records. I think a newish habit may be good and stuck now.
I started keeping a writing log in February. I wish I’d done it last May, but not all realizations come when we’d like them to. It’s relatively simple (or is for me; I love an involved spreadsheet sometimes). These are the columns:
- Date
- What’d you do?
- What was fun and easy?
- What was hard?
- Any new to-dos today?
- Notes
- What do you want to do tomorrow?
- What’s a sentence you like?
- Word count, if you want
And that’s all. I made you a blank version here. I like a little flourish for the column heads, so there’s color and a fancier font; make a copy and change it however you need.
I always include the date, what I did, what was fun and easy, a sample sentence, and word count. I try to always include what I want to do tomorrow, because there are times where I have no natural sense of where I left off the day before, and it acts like a lifeline on those directionless days. New to-dos are more relevant when I’m working on a project that’s waning, like finishing a first-draft or knocking off to-dos for a revision. In that case, if I add new to-dos, it’s noteworthy, and I like recording my thoughts about the choices that led to expansion when I’d been meaning to contract.
Notes can be anything from story turns I didn’t expect to “maybe I should pay someone to transcribe these notebooks” to talking about having a stupid day.
This method is straight from Sarah Von Bargen’s recommendation to track process and not progress. We don’t have a whole lot of control over if we become measurably better writers, get published, or become a bestseller. We can control whether we write regularly, if we seek useful criticism and learn from it, and if we send submissions out or write queries to agents. I use it in other things too: job seeking, working on acquiring a particular skill, or anything else where the only thing I can really do is put in the work. When I see those spreadsheet lines filling, I at least know I’m pulling the one lever I really have control over.
The mix of qualitative and quantitative helps too. Sometimes it helps me to read back and see how many days I’ve been at this; at some point, it might be more beneficial for me to do a sum of all those word-count columns and see the bare numbers. In June, I needed to just that when I wanted to tally how much I wrote for #1000WordsOfSummer. Look what you did, but in the best way.
When I finished the first draft during last year's NaNoWriMo, the draft I'm currently working through post-its as I push it toward second-draft status, I narrowed down what was left by adding “IP” in incomplete sections, for “in progress.” It’s a road trip story, so mostly linear and organized by day. It worked to say that Wednesday wasn’t done yet, to look at the headings on the left in my Google Doc and see that three days were left incomplete (and then two days, then one, and then none). For my wilder beast of an ongoing revision, I have a list in my notes doc called “How to finish this.” I don’t pretend it’s comprehensive, but I strikeout things slightly more often than I add them, and that feels like progress too.
There are other measures, of course: my characters feel better formed. I understand a character’s motivation better than I did. I’ve created a rapport between two imaginary people. A subplot that felt thin and dicey now feels substantial and real. These are good too, and arguably more important. But for day-to-day stuff, I like a simpler gauge. Maybe my time in software engineering has given me a weird love of dashboards. I’m at x words, I have y things left to finish, and z edits to consider accepting. I know it’ll mutate, but to at least know where I am today is enough.
It may surprise you, after all this, to learn that I’m a hybrid between a plotter and a pantser. I use outlines the same way I use all the other structure I’ve just described to you: when I don’t have to think about some things, when they’re locked down in plain black text on a screen, part of my brain is liberated to get to the fun stuff. If I know something, I write it down, and then I can go forth into the wild world and get good and lost, because I know the structure will be there when I come back. I treat my regular life the same way: I always have my planner, my planner has daily goals and weekly goals, and with that in place I can relax a little more.
What about you? Do you count things or keep a record of your efforts?
Here are some things I've written or liked.
- Drunk Writing Advice: Things Breasts Can't Actually Do: highlights include how breasts cannot harbor ill will, possess telepathic qualities, or perform a barrel roll.
- KJ Charles: When Not to Write: my Seattle therapist described this phenomenon as yeasty times. It's not the same as not working; it's just the quiet stuff that takes place below the surface and enables all the flashier stuff that comes later.
- Jami Attenberg: The Wrong Right Way: "I write as sloppy and fast as I can. Then I circle the good stuff and cut the rest." Her friend describes how making first drafts is making raw material, not the final thing. First drafts are material to be sculpted. The more obviously glorious stuff comes from that.
And finally, a sentence I've written recently that I liked: “You’re afraid of bureaucracy and paperwork and being tied to things, and you moved to Germany and got married. Yeah, that makes sense. Good job.”
I went to Seattle for the briefest amount of time recently. It was meant to be short and then was cut shorter by having to double back to Oakland for an emergency. Fortunately, I got to go see Zoolights. If you watched me from a distance in the last couple months of the year, you might think I was a person who really liked the holidays, but mostly I find them melancholy and try to throw myself into the parts I like: certain live shows, some of the food, and LIGHTS. I'll be seeing the ones at the Oakland Zoo again this year too. I think the same people make the light structures for both Seattle and Oakland; they're similarly trippy, fully of rainbow sloths, watercolor-hided crabs, and other things from the more wonderfully strange side of the brain. And in the darkest months, sometimes a yards-long illuminated dragon is exactly what the heart needs.