Hi writers, how do you know if you’re getting better?
It can be hard to judge. Writing (any kind of art) is so subjective, and we’re often the worst judges of our work anyway. (The same story can seem terrible and pretty good to me, depending on my mood,)
What about asking friends? Well, they can’t be trusted either. They’re your friends. They’re biased. They want to see improvement in your work, so of course they do.
And forget getting better, how do you even measure the work you do day to day? Whether it was a good day or a bad day, or if you’re on track or behind?
It’s easy to see why word count gets prioritized when trying to measure progress in writing, whether we’re talking about becoming a better writer, or becoming a more productive writer. It’s concrete! Easy to keep track of! You can plug numbers into pretty spreadsheets and feel like you’re making progress! And to be clear, I think there’s definitely value in paying attention to word count, and if it works for you, that’s awesome! But I also think that focusing on word count can be a trap.
You can burn out.
It’s really easy to get seduced by the ever-increasing word count to keep writing more and more each day, trying to surpass your count (or even just keep up!) It can feel really thrilling and even easy, at times, to keep hitting 1000, 2000, 5000, even 10,000 a day… but that pace is hard to sustain, and you can burn out on writing to the point where you need time off. You might even be sick of your WIP by then. It can also feel demoralizing when you stop hitting those numbers.
Focusing on word count can obscure other issues.
Those of you who are plotters, I salute you! You may not have this problem because you have a road map, and your word count is building on the blueprint. Those of us who are discovery writers and pantsers, though, might find that focusing purely on work count generation comes at the expense of other writing work. Stuff like, figuring out character arcs. Geography and setting details. What the story actually is and what it isn’t. Sometimes you need to write 30k words really quickly to get the bones of the story down, and that’s cool!
Other times, and this has happened to me, you have no idea what the story is and you keep going, and you end up with 50k words of… crap. 50K words of meandering and of trying to figure out where the story’s going and who these characters are. And sometimes that’s necessary. Other times, the focus on word count might have pressured you into putting words down when you really needed to step back and think instead of write.
And that can be days without hitting your word count. And that is okay. Because the work of writing is more than getting words on a page. Which brings me directly to the next, and most important, point:
The work of writing is more than getting words down.
Writing words is only part of it. For me, oddly, it’s an ever-decreasing part. I’ve learned that for the kind of writer I am, and where I am in my writer’s education, I need to spend more time on developing the right words and the right technique. And that means that I spend a lot of time reading, writing critiques, studying, researching, thinking; I spend time watching films and TV shows; I spend time going on walks and daydreaming; drawing; playing music.
All of that is writing work. It’s work that will help me select the write words, write intentionally, write carefully.
This might seem heretical, but I don’t have as much faith in the “ugly first draft” as I once did. I’ll explain more next week, but it’s related to this word count thing.
Anyway! Tracking word count can be super useful. But don’t mistake it for tracking your progress as a writer! And don’t feel like you’re not making progress if you’re not making impressive word counts! There are other ways to evaluate your growth, and it might be worth developing some metrics for yourself.