More writing advice about “daily words”

As I’m quoted saying, I’m a third rate hack that can’t keep his stories from meandering to the finish line. Take this advice with the grain of salt it merits. Today I’m going to go into a little more depth over something I mentioned last month, daily writing goals. Despite how close we are to NanoWriMo, this isn’t about that. This isn’t a gimmick to get a novel out in a month, but the methodology I’ve adopted for getting the first draft done. If only I could apply this same approach to other things, like weight loss. Or learning Sanskrit.

I’ve toyed with word counts before. The same elation you get from being able to say “I hit my goal today!” with some fancifully large number quickly transmorphs into guilt and embarrassment when you don’t achieve another great number the next day. Or you have that day where real life is just a bitch that won’t let go of you. Maybe it’s your job (what, you have my job too?), maybe its your family obligations (after practice, you need to take Bobby to his appointment, pick up Sally from her study group, make dinner, and get Rojur to his recital, corral everyone for homework, put the finishing touches on the kid’s school projects, all seventeen of which are due the next day, when you also agreed to help bake cupcakes for a school event 28 months ago when Tuesday looked completely free on your calendar), or heck, maybe it’s just life.

Enter the dragon, your work in progress. You want to write, you can feel the words itching under your skin, but when your alarm is set to go off the next morning six hours before you can conceivable go to bed, how exactly is that supposed to work? Keeping word count goals is great, but how do you do that reasonably?

By knowing which compromises you can make and which you can’t.

I have written for 64 straight days now. I have a friend who is currently counting that number in the hundreds, so I know I can do more. But even my 2 month streak is something that can be achieved, not with discipline (hah! If you know me, you know how miserable I am at self discipline), but just by knowing what compromises you can make.

Start with a reasonable target.

All is for naught if your target is some fabricated number that you can’t possibly make. If you have a good idea of what your average word count is, that’s where you should start. Maybe you are capable of 2000 words every day. I’m not. I’m capable of doing between 500 and 600 usually, with random bursts in the thousands. Start reasonable.

More is ok, but that doesn’t get you off the hook tomorrow

If you do have a stellar day, that’s great. Be proud. Parade around in your significant other’s skivvies for an hour singing “I am the very model of a modern major general” like you own it. But tomorrow, you start over, because there is no banking it. There is doing, and not doing, and we are all doers, right? Right.

LESS IS OK TOO

This is the hard one to come to grips with, because we all want to succeed, and failing to achieve an arbitrary number we set for an arbitrary project which, frankly, no one is probably expecting us to finish yet is still failure. Isn’t it?

No.

Failure is not even trying. 400 words? 300? Whatever. The act of writing is the habit we are reinforcing here.

Even one sentence counts. Even one word.

I have this trick. I keep a spreadsheet in Google with a graph of my daily word counts. Occasionally, when it is late and the kids are in bed and no one is around to see me, I like to pull out that chart and just look at the dips and peaks. They’re so sexy. In a lot of ways, I’m writing each day just to keep that graph looking hot. You know what makes a graph look like shite? A day with a zero on it. Even if that means I wrote a 10 word sentence, so be it, at least I kept it from hitting zero. Even if I typed one, really, really good word, that’s still not zero. And it counts. Maybe not a parade around the house victory, but there have been a few days this week where I’ve been willing to settle if necessary for that one word day.

There’s a funny thing about writing one sentence.

Unless I’m actually passed out, I can’t do it. Not just one. I have to write a second one, to justify the first, maybe provide some better context. And a third to draw them together. Maybe even a fourth, you know, to provide unity and structure. That’s a paragraph. I don’t know if you’ve read, like, books before, but that’s how they’re made. Bit of insider secret there, books are made by putting words together in almost coherent structures (fans of James Joyce or Kurt Vonnegut might disagree, I know).

The last two days this week, my word counts were in the 200’s. No joke. 12 and 14 hour days at the day job don’t leave a lot of room for being wordy. But I’d still hold those days up with pride, because I didn’t stop, didn’t not make words.

No take backs.

This rule is as important as the “even one word counts” rule. No take backs. No halfsies. You can’t bank words towards the future, and you can’t withdraw them from the past. You can edit as you type, sure, nothing can stop me from doing that, but you can’t erase a passage and rewrite it. Just move on, make a note, and come back to it in a revision. Need to add a new scene? Do it. Need to change how  a scene is structured? Make notes.  Need to remove a scene? How do you know? How do you know without finishing that you really need to do that, or that there aren’t bits you can salvage still? Save it. Otherwise you have to erase past word achievements, and like everything else, unless you have a time machine, the past is written in stone. Hard, unalterable stone. Not even a millennia of water erosion can change this stone. Use your time machine for something useful, like getting cheaper gas for your car or hamburger for dinner.

No, I have to be pretty clear about this – there are no take backs, no deletes. That’s what revisions are for. Why take away all the fun from your revision party?

I, the unpublished sage, have spoken. Go forth and write. Maybe next week I’ll show you my pretty graph, the curves really are quite sexy.

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