My Word Count Is Higher Than Your Word Count

Toward the end of last month, I began to see "I Won" badges being shared by Facebook friends who had hit their NaNoWriMo goal of writing 50,000 words during November. It was neat to get a little buzz off their excitement. But then I began to see links to blog posts that included variations of "I Lost" in the title. Not so buzzy. It's been many years since I've taken part in NaNoWriMo, but I don't recall this Win/Lose thing. I may not have a good grasp of the word "lose," but I can't imagine a universe in which having started a book length project and worked on it at all makes anyone a loser.

Having those "I Lost" images in my mind left me particularly interested when I stumbled upon When Did Writing Become A War? by Lev Raphael at the Huffington Post. Raphael says, "The sensible suggestion that beginning writers should try to write something daily to get themselves in the habit has seemingly become interpreted as a diktat for all writers all the time. What we write doesn't matter, it's how much we write every single day... As if we were the American war machine in 1943 determined to churn out more tanks, planes and guns..."  "There's nothing wrong with having a daily goal if that works for you as a writer," he goes on, "but why should you be ashamed or crazed because you don't reach that daily goal -- what's the sense in that? Why have we let the word count become our master?"

Focusing on word count as a way to help stay on task or get more done in a specific amount of time are logical work strategies. But the shame thing is counterproductive. Feeling bad about ourselves undermines willpower, and willpower is necessary for that staying on task business.

Time Management Tuesday: Increasing Your Word Count Is Exhausting

If you've been following my May Days project, you know that I was working on doing more with the time I have by increasing my word count. You probably also know that I didn't get anywhere near the 10,000 words a day mark that author Rachel Aaron describes in her book 2k to 10k. Only once did I approach the 2,000 words she started with. Did this mean my May Days was a failure?

Hardly. I ended up with two things:

1. Rough drafts of four new chapters for a long-term project. Since I already had five chapters, I'm probably past the halfway point. If I were a better plotter, I'd know.
2. A new writing process that involves concentrating on planning scenes and chapters before starting to write. 

In addition to working with scenes, I was also staying immersed in this project, which I find helps to generate new work. But how do you stay immersed? You have to not do other things that need to be done. Planning an appearance. Staying up on promotional activities. Helping a friend move.

Everything you choose to do means you are choosing not to do something else. One of the sad realities of time.

I found this past month exhausting. It was a combination of hustling to stay on top of scene planning and writing and the anxiety of knowing I had other work that needed to be done. The last few days I was hanging on by my teeth. And now I'm right into another binge job, prepping for a speaking appearance at the Ethan Allen Homestead.  

June is going to be lost to Ethan, some family business, and a long weekend. Then I hope to get back to my May Days manuscript. My goal is to finish a rough draft before a September vacation.

Time Management Tuesday: Obsessing Is A Time Suck

Let's see, one change I've been working on this past month (May Days!) to increase my word count is to pay attention to scenes. I'm planning them ahead of time, structuring them, and confining material to a limited number of scenes in a chapter instead of meandering here and there. I think it's making a difference.

You know what else is making a difference with word count? I think? Not obsessing on making everything perfect before I move on. I can lose forty minutes or much, much more fixating on getting every word right because each paragraph is a foundation for the next paragraph, and I need a good foundation! Then I might come up with something while working on chapter nine that means changes in seven and eight and maybe I need to have one character own a smartphone, so I have to go back and do that.

This kind of thing sucks up time, big time and keeps me from generating new work.

This past week I've been able to make notes about how I want to change a paragraph when I can't get there immediately. Then I jump it and move on. That business about coming up with something in chapter nine that requires changes in chapters seven and eight? That was real. I opened those earlier chapters and left instructions for myself.

And then I moved on.

Now, I won't know how well this works until I get to the end of the road and start the next draft. But for now, I am piling up words.

But nothing like the 10,000 words a day I was shooting for.

Time Management Tuesday: Using Scenes And Chapters To Manage The Time You Have

First off, my word count since last we were together: Friday--995 words, Saturday--65 words, Monday--1,640 words, and today 1,009 words. I did get some additional work done today on next month's presentation, which has been hanging over my head.

Note Saturday's pathetic word count. In my defense, I'd like to say that I don't usually work at all on weekends. In my defense, I'd also like to say that on Saturday I also did some scene planning.

In last week's post I agreed with Rachel Aaron that knowing what you're going to write is essential to increasing word count. Or in my case, it seems, maintaining any kind of word count worth mentioning. One way she says you will know what you're going to write is by planning scenes.

As with most aspects of planning/plotting a story, coming up with scenes is easier said than done. The easier part, though, comes along if you keep in mind that scenes keep you from just randomly writing, stumbling around through text. Scenes are specific moments, steps in a story. They are made up of action that takes place in one place at one time, and they reveal new information. You're doing something specific with them. I've found thinking in terms of scenes and planning them hugely helpful this past month.

I include a little something I got from The Plot Whisperer while planning my scenes. I want them to relate to character, plot, or theme. More than one of those items? Terrific. But at least one.

And chapters? Again, they shouldn't be random. You shouldn't be starting a new chapter because it feels right. (Yeah, I've done that.) Aaron quotes Holly Lisle on the subject. In a chapter, something changes. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that.

Seriously. Knowing stuff, at least about scenes and chapters, means you can write faster. Writing faster is like finding time.

Time Management Tuesday: I See An Improvement In Writing Speed

So you'll recall that I'm working on a manuscript as part of my May Days effort and experimenting with upping my daily word count. That's doing more with the time you have, folks. When I was finally able to get started on my project, I was getting numbers like 534 and 209 a day. Yeah. I actually went down. I don't know what happened the third day. I forgot to record my numbers.

But yesterday I went up to 1,400 words and today to 1,800. That's not the 10,000 words Rachel Aaron talks about in the book I read to prep for this month. I haven't even gotten to the 2,000 words that was her starting point when she started pumping up her own word count. But what a jump for me.

This week's improvement was due, I think, to Aaron's contention that knowing what you're going to write is necessary for a good word count. I was able to do a lot of planning for the last two day's work. I've got plans for the next chapter, too. After that I don't know.  

I've had times when I've been able to get the word count up before. When it has happened, I think it was due to my being able to immerse myself in a project and stay there. Staying in a project, in my experience, is the best way to come up with those plans that allow you to know what you're going to write. The more you work on something, the more you're able to work.

I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that I have a speaking engagement next month that I really ought to start preparing for. It takes me forever to do that sort of thing. Working on that will keep me from the immersion I seem to need to develop some work speed. The good news is that I picked up something from Aaron's book that I think is helping me and might offset a little appearance preparation time.

Next week: scenes and chapters.

Time Management Tuesday: That Do More With Less Time Plan Fell Apart For A While

My May Days Project got off to a really bad start.

The Plan

You will recall that I was planning to generate work on a project that I'd set aside last year and, at the same time, work on increasing my word count as a way to do more with less time. So I've been using 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, etc. by Rachel Aaron to help me do this. Aaron writes that a key element in writing faster is knowing what you're going to write before you get started. So in addition to bringing myself up to speed with this project by revising the few chapters I'd already written, I was going through my materials on characters, historical elements, timing, etc., to help me plan some scenes, which as far as this organic writer is concerned, would be knowing what I was going to write.

Last Tuesday, two days before the beginning of May, I took a look at the scene file I'd started last year. Yikes! It was a mess. I had made a list of scenes, but the beginning scenes didn't entirely match what I'd actually written (not a problem, it's the result that matters) and later scene plans weren't all that helpful, in part because of how the story now started. Well, I said, you will spend tomorrow, Wednesday, cleaning this stuff up and getting some scene plans in order.

What Could Go Wrong?

However, Tuesday evening I received a request for chapters and a synopsis for another manuscript that I had submitted to someone. Yikes again! This was good news, right? Of course, it was.  Someone was interested in one of my projects. But I didn't have a synopsis ready to go. As I told you this past weekend, I spent five days writing it. That included the Wednesday I was going to spend on scene planning and the Friday I was going to spend writing. (Thursday is family/runaround day at Chez Gauthier, and I've given up pretending I work on weekends.)

We have talked about these time management issues here before. That synopsis was what is known as reactive work. I needed to drop the creative work I was doing to react to an incoming request. It was also an example of situational time management. I had to adapt very rapidly to a new situation.

What The Hell, Right? No.

The synopsis went out Sunday, so my situation has changed again. What should I do now? I wasn't able to finish my planning and I wasn't able to get started with writing. What the Hell. I might as well do something else.

That is what's known in self-discipline circles as the What-the-Hell Effect. It's a major reason for self-discipline failures. Instead of staying on task with a diet, people say what the hell at ten in the morning because they ate two doughnuts at nine and figure they might as well give up and start again tomorrow. In reality, they've got many hours left in the day during which they can stay with their program. The same is true with managing time, whether you're talking about a day or a week or a month. I have a lot of time left in this month that I can use for my planned project, even though I've lost some of it early on.

Fighting The What-the-Hell Effect Leads To Results You Can See

Last week was then, this is now, and now is an entirely different situation to work within. Additionally, I don't need to feel bad about myself for not working on my May Days project last week. (Feeling bad is the big reason for giving into the What-the-Hell Effect.) I was working and working on something significant, just not the significant something I planned to work on. Yesterday I continued with the last of the revising of the early chapters of my May Days manuscript, and I have the next few scenes planned. Since I'm an organic writer, just knowing what I'm going to be doing a few scenes ahead may be the best I can expect. We'll have to see how the rest of the month goes.

Oddly enough, I had What-the-Hell issues with last year's May Days project, too. And, yet, the work I ended up doing that month led to more work later in the year, and I'm back on the same manuscript now.  That, lads and lasses, is an example of why fighting the What-the-Hell Effect is so important.

Time Management Tuesday: Preparing To Do More With The Time I Have

Last week I wrote about my plan to try to up my word count during my May Days project. My idea is that one way to manage time is to do more with the time you have, rather than to try to create more time. This past week I read 2,000 to 10,000 How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron to help me get prepped for writing faster.

First off, I'd just like to say that this is a self-published eBook. In my experience, self-publishing, particularly of eBooks, has made it possible for writers and bloggers to toss together any kind of thoughts relating to a subject and publish them as if they're some kind of authority, when, once you've read a chapter or two, you realize they most definitely are not. That is not the case with 2,000 to 10,000! This is a very good book, and it only costs ninety-nine cents! Seriously, when I can find the time, I'm going to throw away some of the stodgy, academic writing books I've picked up here and there because the author was a well-known professor or a family member had to buy them for a college course and they made their way to me. I can see them on the shelf above my computer.

My only reservation about this book is that it might be more useful to writers with some experience, people who have struggled with writing, recognize problems, and can see how Aaron's solutions can help them. A total newbie might not be as taken with 2,000 to 10,000 as I am.

Aaron says there are three elements to increasing word count.  The one I'm going to dwell on today is knowing what you're going to write before you get started. Over the course of my career, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat down to start a book with only the vaguest idea of what I was going to say. With my last two books (which, I must admit, I haven't sold) I stumbled upon some of Aaron's suggestions on my own because I was hunting for ways to plot ahead of time and cut down on the number of drafts I have to write.

Some of her suggestions, and what I've done with them in the past:

• Write down what you already know about the idea you've chosen to write about.
• A problem I've had in the past is that I didn't know enough about my idea. It was a situation, not a story idea in which something happens to somebody. Perhaps if I'd tried this step, I would have realized I didn't have a story to tell. Or the act of writing what I did know down would have helped generate a story.

• Do some work on characters, plot, and setting.
• For characters this can involve any kind of character chart. These things are all over the Internet. I have used them, and I think you can go overboard and overwhelm yourself with too much info. Nonetheless, I have found them helpful because when you've worked out info about your characters, you get ideas for things they could end up doing and that's plot, something I've already admitted I have a lot of trouble with. Character has been a sort of back door into plot for me.
• For plot this can involve listing the scenes you're going to write. Aaron can do this for the entire book. I am happy if I can come up with a list of what's known as candy bar scenes and can get them in order. Aaron also talks about knowing your ending before you start. For the first time, I do have an ending in mind for the book I'm going to be working on next month.
• For setting this could involve creating maps. I have sketched out the floor plans of buildings. I find knowing about setting early on useful because setting has helped me with plot. Certain things can happen in some places that can't happen in others.

Over the next month, I'll discuss more about what Aaron has to say in her book and how I'm using that information.

Some more points I want to make:

1. Aaron talks about spending a couple of days on the kind of planning she writes about. I've spent weeks or months doing this kind of thing.
2. I believe it's a rare day when I've written 2,000 words, so I'm not starting at the same baseline she's talking about. We'll figure out my baseline next week.

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In case you didn't notice, that's a Time Management Tuesday logo on the left at the top of the page. We're into logos here right now.

Time Management Tuesday: Doing More With The Time You Have

My May Days Facebook group is getting ready for what I call another month-long set-aside project. The idea behind the May Days group, itself, is to encourage one another to complete two pages of writing a day. That may sound like a modest goal, but it gives you some idea of how much writers do that's not writing. Some of us need support to help us find the time to get two pages written. I use the month as a unit of time to which I've assigned a particular task. Maybe I'll wring two pages a day out of it, maybe I'll do something else. This year I really am hoping for some new material and try out a new time management process.

I've been spending a lot of time working these last couple of years on projects that didn't involve generating a lot of writing. Instead I was revising completed projects to resubmit, dealing with the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook publication, planning a workshop for a conference, and other such things that take up time. They may even require some new writing, but not a lot of it. For this May Days I'm going to do two things:

• New writing for the mummy project I started outlining during last year's May Days.
• Working on increasing my word count using Rachel Aaron's book, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, as a guide.

My theory is that there are two ways to manage time.

1. Find more time
2. Work more efficiently with the time you have

I've been writing about finding more time for a year and a half or so. Increasing word count could be a way to work more efficiently.

Aaron's fiction is traditionally published with Orbit. However, her topics with Writing Faster, speed and high word counts, are often associated these days with self-publishing authors who support themselves with sales spread over a number of titles available rather than massive sales of just a few. Thus, they need to keep cranking out books. Does that mean that writing faster and producing more won't be of benefit to other types of writers. I'm thinking, no. Writing faster and producing more simply means doing more with the time I have available to me. That's a lot like managing time.

Some points I need to make about my May Days project for this year:

• I did start the planning last May, and I started writing (and rewriting the first few chapters over and over again) later in the year. So I'm not starting from scratch.
• Aaron describes herself as a hardcore plotter. I'm an obsessive organic writer. But I'm already getting ideas for ways I can modify some of the suggestions in Writing Faster to fit my writing style. Otherwise, I will be heading for some kind of breakdown next month, which I would, of course, document here. You don't want any part of that.

Next week I'll bring you up on what I'm doing to prepare for working more efficiently with the month of May.
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This is your last day to comment so you'll be in the running to win a copy of the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook. The drawing will be tomorrow. Happy Earth Day.

Time Management Tuesday: Using Word Count To Help Manage Time

I was wandering around last week's IndieReCon (I still haven't finished browsing the offerings there), when I came upon what was called on the schedule How to Write Fast: 2k to 10k, 2 Years Later by Rachel Aaron. (It's called something different when you follow the link.) Write fast! I thought. If I could do that, wouldn't it have a big, big impact on how I spend my time?

I also recalled hearing about other writers who do use word count to help them manage time. They set themselves a word limit that they must do each day and don't stop working until they've met it. Word count for time management isn't something we've discussed here, so I checked out this IndieReCon offering.

I am not going to address quality and the issue of whether more is less or less is more. Is it better to write a few brilliant passages or crank out some serious volume of whatever quality that you can at least edit in the future? I'm going to try to stick to word count with no value judgement.

Author Rachel Aaron got started writing about word count back in 2011 with a post at her blog called How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day. In it she says there are three elements to increasing word count. The first two I found particularly interesting.

• Know what you're going to write before you get started. This means doing some planning at the beginning of each writing session. Serious plotters/outliners may say they've already done this. Organic writers, such as myself, might want to create a daily pre-writing planning routine. I'm still revising right now, so it will be a while before I can try it.
• Analyze how you're using your writing time. Over a period of a couple of months, keep track of your word count and determine what time of the day it is highest. Then try to make sure that you're able to work then.
• Try to find something to excite you about every scene you have to write. Word count goes up when you're writing the fun scenes. (Sometimes known as candy bar scenes.)

Aaron says in her IndieReCon piece that after two years she isn't writing at the 10,000 word rate she'd first hit when she came up with her system. That would produce 5 to 6 books a year. She's writing at a rate that produces 3 to 4. That's still fast writing.

I don't know how well relying heavily on word count for managing time will work, given the situational problems writers often find themselves dealing with. Word count for a WIP goes out the window if you have to plan a presentation or revise for an editor. Plus Aaron is a self-published writer. Being able to write multiple books a year is important to many self-pubs, particularly the more entrepreneurial ones who are truly trying to make a living with just writing. Other types of writers who have income sources through teaching and making appearances or just a regular day job won't  feel a need to produce as much that quickly. But given all the demands on writers' time, doesn't being able to write more quickly sound very attractive?

Aaron has written a book about writing faster, which I just bought. I'll check it out and be posting on anything new I find there.