Overwhelming Word Count

Feb 1, 2009

I left a comment recently for an author who was talking about how overwhelmed he felt that he was so far behind on his word count for the year.  It’s February 1!  This is far too early to be feeling depressed about the year’s progress!  But every writer faces a case of the “shoulds”.  I should have done this… I should be further ahead… I should have completed this by now… Ack!  I’m getting depressed just thinking about it.

I shared with this fellow writer what I do when I’m in compose-mode, and it fairly well keeps the “shoulds” at bay.  The key for me is to set DAILY goals as well as PROJECT goals.  This way, if I’m behind, I’m never really more than one day behind.  I can also get ahead, and thus “earn” days off.  I find that a big motivator to get ahead of schedule.

I keep an electronic journal (in my Writer’s Cafe program I blogged about a couple weeks ago).  That’s where I keep my goals. A typical entry might look like this:

Begin → 46,111
…
(Daily Goal → 47,836 || 47,872 (+36) ♥♥♥ Project Goal → 46,575 || +1237)

So to break it down:

Begin → previous-sessions-end-count

… (this is where I take note of what I actually did… like… “finished chapter 17, etc”) …

(Daily Goal → begin+todays-goal || actual-count-today ♥♥♥ Project Goal → project-goal || how-far-ahead-or-behind-on-project)  In the above example, I’m 36 words ahead for the day, and 1237 ahead on the project in total.  Meaning that if my goal is 1700 words a day, I’m pretty close to “earning” a day off!

The difference between my Daily Goal and my Project Goal is this… If I want to write 1700 words a day, then my Daily Goal is (yesterday + 1700).  Where my Project Goal would be (the total number of days I’ve been working on it multiplied by 1700).

It might seem pretty convoluted, and probably only works for me because I made it up, so it makes sense to me.  I have no idea whatsoever if this system would work for someone else.

The point really is that to recognise that writing is hard, and setting goals is hard.  But if you set goals that are long term without allowing yourself any victory moments for a good day’s work, then you’ll always feel like you’re behind.  Using the system above, if I was ahead for the day, but behind for the project in total, I would at least have a moment’s satisfaction that I am catching up, making progress, and gaining on it.

Take your victory lap!  Feel good about making progress, because long projects are fraught enough with frustrations and difficulty without adding to them because you didn’t take the time to celebrate the little things.