Subtitle: Why I don’t use word counts as a measure of productivity.
Knitting is awesome. If I follow the pattern, I end up with a sweater. EVERY TIME. I just start at the beginning and go to the end.
Many people think writing is like knitting. They expect to start at the beginning and go to the end. This only works if you have a pattern.
You CAN have a pattern. Formula, outline, or adaptable material are all patterns to follow. But most of the time, I find, people want to go without a pattern AND start from the beginning and go to the end and that is just self-defeating.
I’m well-versed in self-defeat. I failed to make a science fair project in high school because I wasn’t going to do one unless I INVENTED A NEW TECHNOLOGY. (Real, true emotional baggage! Add to that I had a budget of zero dollars and zero cents to spend on inventing a new technology. Did I set that bar a wee bit high?)
Brainy Smurf would have figured it out with a mushroom cap and a flower.
I digress.
For years my self-defeat was to demand that I write 1,000 words a day.
So I’d sit at my laptop, revise a short story for three hours, check the word count and find it was 200 words shorter than when I started. I’d mark the -200 and open the next revision project.
I started writing rambling stream-of-consciousness files just to have positive word counts. “Daily Pages” I called them. I hoped that some of what I wrote could be gleaned into stories. To date, none of it has. And it was ALL MY FAULT for being unable to write one thousand new words of useful prose while also using writing time to revise previous work. I was useless, stupid, and also horrible.
Emotional Baggage
It wasn’t until Summer, 2012, that I set myself a challenge that was not word-count. I vowed to write 50 short story drafts in six weeks. And I did. And fully 26 of those stories have been polished up and submitted to markets. Three have sold. Clearly, the amorphous unit “complete story draft” was more useful to me.
(I’m planning on doing it again this summer! WOOT! )
It’s like… if you’re knitting a sweater from a pattern, saying “I will knit five rows a day” is a good goal and will get you closer to a completed sweater. But if you were planning out the sweater as you went, creating a new design, you would have to un-do rows and start over and trying to get five positive rows a day is just going to make you feel bad.
There is still a part of me that feels “RAR SO BEAT YOURSELF AND SET MORE IMPOSSIBLE GOALS SO YOU WILL MEET THEM YOU SORRY EXCUSE FOR A WRITER!” I suppose we all have a drill sergeant somewhere in our heads. The goal is to recognize when he’s standing in your way instead of spurring you forward.
