A common thing you hear in writing circles is how we writer love to measure our daily word count. Things like “just writing a thousand words a day” are common phrases you will hear in this world. Now, I personally don’t mind daily word counts and if they work for you then that’s great! However, after spending months on my last project focusing on word count goals the more burned out I realized I had become. And personally, as a pantser, all what daily word counts did to me is lead me to write into various dead ends. Time goals on the other hand, those helped me avoid many dead ends and I believe made my writing better.
I had a goal of writing a book within a year last year. So I went about it the way you would expect: by setting a word count goal of 1,000 words a day, every day of the week. On the outset, where the story was much clearer in my head, this was easy. I’d sit down at my writing desk before or after work and churned out 1,000 words a day within an hour easily. But as the story went on, and the many paths it could take approached, those thousand words a day became more of a chore than anything. I felt like I was writing just to get words down on the page, which would lead to my characters making decisions that contradicted them or the story taking a direction that ended up not working in favor of it. By the time I had finished my project, which had a final word count of around 110,000 total words written for it, only 60,000 of those words actually made it into the final revision. That is 50,000 words cut due to dead ends, contradictions, and filler! And it probably would have been way more if I hadn’t changed my measurable goal from daily word count to daily time spent.
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About halfway through the project I had gotten burned out. I think partially it was from work, which at the time I was working a job that was stressing me out and bleeding into my personal and creative lives outside of the office (I have since then switched to a less stressful and more meaningful job which has helped clear my brain for more creative work). But the other half of the burnout I knew was the daily word count. By that point I had written to a few dead ends, forcing me to rewind to an earlier part in the story and go from there. As a pantser I had no direction of then a few beats I would like to reach (but was open on changing if I found a more interesting or true direction to take), which is fine, but the directions I was going were either straying too far away from those beats or going down paths that were not interesting to me as a writer. Then there were the days where I just had zero creative energy, and trying to get those words out strained my brain, adding even more fuel to the burnout. I needed to change my goals if I wanted to get past the burnout and actually finish this project. So like any author, I revised.
I’ve been an avid fan of time tracking in my life. I used to time track nearly everything that was moderately productive in my life. From reading, to writing, to exercise, and even commuting. Plus all my projects at work even though I didn’t need to. Over the years I had dialed it back to just time tracking my personal projects, since I was actually interested in how much time I spent on those. But I was never using time tracking as a way to manage goals. It was just something I used to look back and go “hey, I spent these many hours doing this thing. That’s neat.” The project I was working on was also being time tracked for the sake of seeing how neat it was that I spent X number o hours on it. But one day, perhaps one of immense burnout as I struggled to squeeze out 1,000 words that I knew I would probably backtrack on later, I had a change of mind. I decided in that moment that I was done with forcing half baked words out, I needed something different. And with a timer running in Toggl Track on a different tag it came to me: I shouldn’t just be tracking time, I should be making it a goal too. At that moment I switched my goal from 1,000 words a day, to 1 hour a day.
The results worked immediately for me. I found myself less stressed to write, and I found it easier to avoid dead end. If I felt stuck, I wouldn’t have to worry that the words I was writing were for naught, but I could instead sit there for an hour and meditate on my story, characters, and the direction. Some sessions were just that, meditating on the story and writing out possible beats for it to take. This was also great for me because I’m the kind of person who likes to give myself space between scenes before getting to the next one. I could finish a scene and not worry about jumping straight into the next one to reach my goals (a tactic that often lead to dead ends), but I could spend the remaining time of my creative hour reflecting on where to go next. The positive changes I saw were:
– Less struggling on bad creative days
– Less pressure to get 1,000 good words out a day when I only had 500 good words in me
– No guilt for not being able to hit that word goal
– More space between scenes to reflect on where to take the story next
– More time to outline possible beats (something that 1,000 words a day goal made me feel guilty for doing instead of writing, even if it would be better for my story)
– Allowed me to meditate on my story on days I had no idea where to take it next or zero creative energy
– And many more
Now to play devil’s advocate to myself I can see a few trade offs with this system, such as:
– If you’re a detailed outliner and the story is clear in your head, a word goal might be preferable
– If you’re writing a deadline you might miss it
– If you just want to write no matter what, a word goal words wonders
– If you’re a fast writer maybe 1,000 words is easy for you. For me it take about 1 hour to write 1,000 words on a good day
– If you’re a novice writer, focusing on time is a great way to procrastinate on the writing. I actually do advocate for a manageable word count goal for all new writers, just so you can work on those muscles
This system may or may not work for you depending on your goals and creative process. But personally, as a pantser, it helped a lot for me. I’ve actually since modified my goals and tracking even further to a points based system that works for me, but that’s a discussion for another post. Let me know in the comments what tricks you’ve used to improve your writing goals!
(P.s. I recommend using the free plan from Toggl Track. I might write a future post about my setup just because I love Toggl so much)
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