August 3, 2020

Earnest and the Importance of Hitting Wordcount

JULY TOTALS

• 34,572 words (goal: 41,667 — 7,095 short)

• 21 days written

Year-to-Date Totals

• 234,943 words (of 500,000)
  (July goal: 291,667 — 56,724 short)

I’m knocking 100k off my goals for 2020 and that’s fine.

Sometimes you make lofty goals thinking that the structure that worked for you last year will, if applied correctly, increase output this year. Turns out that’s not a given. This post is about how adjusting expectations gives craft room to grow, or at least how I hope it will.

I signed up to write 500,000 words in 2020. This was my first mistake.

There was precedent. I started writing fiction seriously again in 2013 after several years of academics in its stead. That year I wrote about 80k and have steadily increased my output ever since. In 2019, after a few years of steadily hitting between 250k and 350k, I signed up for an online challenge to write 350k on purpose and with structure. This nearly broke me, so naturally in 2020 I did it again and also made it harder for myself.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the challenge of hitting wordcount is not the thing that worked for me so much as what that structure introduced to my writing habits. Having daily and monthly wordcount goals—and tracking my progress with a spreadsheet—revolutionized how I write. Over the course of 2019, I watched the numbers reflect how my writing changed: I learned the utility of the first draft; I learned that my focus naturally distributes between multiple projects at once; I learned that sitting down and trying to hit a certain number of words per day means I do in fact write more; and I learned what it looks like in the numbers when you write too much.

In 2019, I obliterated my goal and finished the year with a wordcount of 489,177. This is bonkers, and should not be repeated. I’m glad I did it, don’t get me wrong; it taught me things beyond just “oh God, never do that again.” (As you can see by my lofty goals this year, my reaction at the time was in fact the opposite.) I took an average of 25k a month at the beginning of the year to 40k six months later—then, in the fall, I hit some kind of motherlode of inspiration and wrote 90,551 words in October alone.

Don’t do this.

90k is nuts. 90k is a brick shithouse of output. Once during that doomed October, I wrote 30k in a week.

If I’m very lucky, I’ll never write like that again. Reality ceased to meaningfully exist. There was only the fiction, the characters, their arcs. My eyes made crunching sounds every time I moved them. They were only still in their sockets for lack of better prospects elsewhere. If I was on particularly salient terms with reality that day, I remembered to eat a couple of meals.

But this, like all mistakes, taught me. I learned the utility of a first draft. Turns out my output can fly when I don’t care about editing much. On the one hand, I’ve been suffering from that lesson ever since; I’m convinced part of the reason my 2020 wordcounts have suffered has to do with trying to edit the garbage of yesteryear. I scrapped 106k on one project in March. It just wasn’t working. One hundred and six thousand words into the reject pile, where I now reference it while rewriting it all completely from scratch.

Eyestrain and consequences are good for the soul. It worked out. May I never repeat it.

(My best wordcount in a single day last year, by the way, was 7,508 words. Those people who tell you they can write 12k a day? It’s physically possible, sure. But it’s shifty business. Look too closely at those words and they start to disappear.)

Divine inspiration wore off sometime in mid-November, and by December my wordcount had restored itself to its usual 27-35k value. It has stayed there for the entirely of 2020—partly, yes, because of the editing clusterfuck I created for myself last year. But it’s also partly just because that’s the natural pace I write when I’m also editing and not possessed by the extant spirit of Danielle Steele.

For most of this year, I’ve been looking at my wordcount feeling stagnant and lacking momentum. But there’s nothing wrong with my totals. I can bang out 1,500 words of first draft in a few hours most days; but a first draft is only so useful. The numbers fall off the second I have to spend time editing, and then I sit there looking at my monthly totals, not hitting them, feeling like I’ve failed myself.

But I was playing a failing game. To write 500,000 words in a year, you have to write an average of 1,370 words a day—every day. If you only write five days a week as I tend to do, that’s an average of 1,916 a day. It’s 9,615 words a week—again, every week. It’s 41,667 words a month. 

Now budget in the time required to take a story from first to final draft.

Turns out I can’t do both. I can write 500,000 words in a year fine, but I can’t write that many good words, or complete ones. Seven months into 2020, I have hit my monthly goal of 41,667 words twice. In July, having traveled or been away from my laptop for six days of it, I hit 34k. I’m pretty pleased with that given the challenges of the month; I probably would have hit 42k if not for life happenings. But the thing is that life does tend to happen, often, every month. So an adjustment seems warranted.

For a 500,000 word goal in 2020, I am 57k short. To catch up to 500k in the final five months of the year, I’d have to write 53,011 words a month, 1,767 words / day (if writing daily), or 2,409 words / day (if writing 5 days / week). It’s technically doable (remember, I have considerable swaths of unscheduled time), but it’s no longer the most useful way for me to spend my time. What’s an extra 100k of first drafts if they suck to write and I have to fix them heavily later?

Having a daily wordcount is still a handy tool for me; it helps output, it gives me a daily goal to work toward. But it’s worth remastering in light of my natural pace. I was a different writer seven months ago than I am today. Meeting the arbitrary standard I set myself then isn’t in my creative best interests anymore.

To hit 400,000 words for the year, on the other hand, I have to write 33,011 words/month for the next five months. That’s my natural pace. I’ve done it several times already this year. It’s 1,100 words a day on average, 1,500 a day if I write five days a week.

For most of the year, I’ve felt like my process was decaying; actually, it was growth. Last year I learned to commit to first drafting, and I’m a better writer for it. This year I learned first draft shouldn’t be my central goal. The problem has never been my writing methods, but how I measured success.

As my writing improves and develops in complexity, I’ll probably have to keep adjusting my goals to figure out what works for me now instead of for the skills I was building last year. Which is good! I definitely feel super capable of admitting defeat on a regular basis. Completely revamping my work habits is good, to me.

Always more skills left to learn. That is a more soothing parting note.

JULY MEDIA ROUNDUP

Here’s some of what shaped me in July.

BOOKS

• CITY OF STAIRS, Robert Jackson Bennett (3.5*)

• EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU, Celeste Ng (4*)

• YOU ARE INVITED, Sarah A. Denzil (2*)

• EDUCATED, Tara Westover (5*)

• CITY OF BLADES, Robert Jackson Bennett (4*)

• LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, Celeste Ng (4.5*)

ARTICLES & TWITTER THREADS

• Lauren Michele Jackson at Slate on the fuss over Robin DiAngelo’s WHITE FRAGILITY and who the book is for

• Osita Nwanevu in the New Republic on the reactionary backlash to progressive politics from liberals

• Emanuel Maiberg in Vice on the not-so-hidden Israeli politics coded into THE LAST OF US II (spoilers)

• David James Poissant in LibHub on the difficulties of trying to adjust his novel to capture the current moment over eight years

• Melissa Caruso on making lawbound magic systems dynamic in your world:

Okay, so in fantasy we LOVE our characters with extremely powerful magic. How do we keep that from derailing the plot? (Thread!)

PODCAST

I listened to every episode of START WITH THIS, a podcast on writing craft from the creators of Night Vale. I took a ton away from it; I think it’s one of the more valuable writing advice resources out there right now. This episode on writer’s block especially found me. A brief quote:

[Writer’s block] is not really about the writing. It’s just things that are happening to you as a total human being. …It could be any number of myriad things. You could be just tired, or hungry, or overworked, so your brain just can’t function the way it needs to. … We don’t think about teacher’s block, or HR person’s block. Everybody has times when they feel too tired to do their work or too overwhelmed to do their work, but for some reason, with writers, we want to make it this separate, almost sacred entity. Like: ‘I’m not just overwhelmed, I’m suffering from this long tradition of writer’s block’ — you’re not. … You’re just having trouble doing your work, the way anyone in any profession has trouble doing their work. (6:00-7:30)

Next week I’ll be back to talk about how to hit those wordcount goals when writing sucks really bad.

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