Last week, I wrote about my process, and yet never mentioned word count. My relationship with word count has evolved greatly over just the last year, and it makes some amount of sense that I forgot to include it. My post last week was also getting a bit on the long side. I enjoy this blog but only so long as it doesn’t detract from writings of greater personal importance. This blog is a way to work through my writing and talk about it in a somewhat public space, but I don’t want it to be a crutch and I certainly don’t want it to be the only thing I write.

Let me start with where I think word-count-focused writing begins for a lot of people, with NaNoWriMo. If you are unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo it stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place every year in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in that period, which translates to roughly 1,667 words per day. Now don’t misunderstand some of the things I am about to say. I love NaNoWriMo. It’s a chance to buckle down, with a goal, and feel like you accomplished something at the end.

The challenge itself has some issues. The first is that a novel is not 50,000 words. Double that and you have something. The second is that most full-time writers often write more than 1,667 words in a day and yet they don’t come out with new novels every few months. NaNoWriMo is great, but it sets people up to fail. It promises to push them to the top of a mountain but leaves the writer merely sitting base camp. Closer to the summit? Sure. Something you should be proud of? Of course. But you still have so far to go, you might be burned out, and with the no-looking-back attitude of NaNoWriMo, you probably have a lot of bad writing left in your wake.

Last year, I wanted to do a big push. I wanted to take things seriously. I didn’t want NaNoWriMo to define my writing. To be fair, it never defined my writing, but I did use it as a motivational tool, and last year NaNoWriMo was to be the end of a year-long road instead of the beginning of something. I would test myself. Test my endurance. And chase word count every month, building toward that 1,667.

It worked. I did it. And I often wrote utter shit. Sometimes I wrote shit because when I had finally carved out the time in the day I just didn’t have the mind for it. I wrote in junk files often, began projects that I didn’t believe in or have strong concepts for, and ignored my main project far too much, in part, because I knew that adding a significant amount of words to it, would take too much time. There was just too much to figure out sometimes for writing this scene or that scene.

I’ve always chased word count. Watching the number go up, knowing that once it hit a certain threshold I could stop and give my fingers a rest. I would see how fast I could write. Impress myself with WPM and left a trail of typos as I went.

By the time NaNoWriMo came and was conquered, I experienced burnout. But it was an odd burnout. I managed to rewire my brain a bit. Writing became more of a need than a want, but that word count still loomed large.

I’m a data guy and someone who has often designed and built games as a hobby and who loves to use a good spreadsheet to make a decision. I was gamifying my writing and I knew it. Tracking every day, looking at the average, the remainder, and setting goals, and none of them were in the service of good writing, just writing.

It wasn’t until that December when I took a step back and had the slow realization that all this time, and we are talking about more than just a year, but years, I had been incentivizing the wrong thing.

When I began this year I already knew that I was not going to emphasize word count, but rather writing time. I’ve barely looked at word count this year, and when I have it wasn’t session count but just a piece of information. Is this chapter too long? What is my total project word count sitting at? How much backstory did I write for this thing?

I still get distracted and find myself on other projects, but sometimes you have to get an idea down so it stops infecting your mind. It also means I can do other writing-related things and not feel like I am wasting time. Last year, I kept trying to find ways to count proofing time towards my word count. I could count those words and just take a percentage right? What if I am rewriting a section but using some of it? Should I copy this sentence so that it counts double somehow? All sorts of shit like that would come up that I would try to justify so that I could make my writing better but still win at my game.

Now I just use the time and I can feel it in my bones whether the time was used well or not. I try to carve out time every day. I try to make that time matter in whatever way is most productive and I measure that productivity in my bones.

What’s more, I no longer feel like I have to find an excuse to write. I don’t have to tell my family that I didn’t hit my word count yet today and I need like 20 minutes. I can just tell them I am going to write. A good family, like mine, and hopefully like yours, understands.

I don’t know what I am going to do for NaNoWriMo this year, maybe I will return to word count. If I do, I think I’ll have to do it with something new. With some project that I have on deck for just such an occasion. Until then, I will remain yours, blissfully unaware of word count.

Quote of the Moment:

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
―Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson