To Count or Not to Count? Keeping Daily Word Counts

Abacus Seller, photographed by William Carrick

Lots of writers keep a daily word count, logging or tweeting about it as a personal or public way of tracking their efforts. Many writers find this useful and inspiring. I’ve tried it off and on, and it’s not for me.

Many people write quite a bit faster than I do and others write slower. Others have a much longer or shorter process from first to finished draft. Noting a simple number, even if it’s just supposed to be proof of ass-in-chair, naturally invites comparison in a way that feels counter-productive to me. Don't get me wrong; daily word counts work for a lot of writers. They can be an excellent way to track effort and inspire consistency.

And I do want to track my writing, so I decided to design something that will work for me. Essentially, I want a metric that can:

• Help me understand my process better, so that I can improve it.
• Help me better estimate how long it will take to finish a particular project.
• Inspire me by reminding me of how much I’ve accomplished each day, and showing me how far I’ve progressed on a particular project.

My Process: My Metric

My process continues to evolve. In my quest to balance spontaneity and plotting, I have been spending more time outlining. My outlines have become a weird hybrid of brainstorming, outlining, and drafting. They include scene fragments and dialogue along with the plot points. Then there's also all the noodling I do in my journal. These words are often meta thoughts about theme and tone of the piece I'm working on, nothing that will make it into the draft. The above represents a lot of story work and a lot of words. Recording the number of words spent on this doesn't feel meaningful to me, and counting them – especially the handwritten material in my journal – can be onerous.

After the outline is built with it's thumbnail sketches of scenes, the first draft may only take a couple days, then it’s time for revision. In the first revision I'll hack out whole scenes and rework parts of the outline. I'll write new words and rework many more. Often on revision days my net "new" word count is 0. Unacceptable!

So, I've decided to try using the Pomodoro Technique, not only to accomplish my writing, but to track it. I started keeping track in a paper journal, but have moved to a table in Word. It's an informal list of my Pomodoros for the day and short description of what I accomplished in each 25 minutes.

I've written about the Pomodoro method before and why I like it so much for writing (by breaking everything into manageable chunks, it allows me to make an end run around the natural resistance I feel when tackling big projects)

I can always fit in at least three Pomodoros into my day and I've had a couple days where I've managed seven and eight (albeit scattered throughout the day). Marking these down on my tally sheet with a note about what I accomplished is proving rewarding, and I hope, before too long, the information will help me improve my process.

I wrote this blog in 4 Pomodoros (100 minutes):

1. Free write and drafting: finding the idea (budded off two potential ideas for other blogs cut and pasted into separate doc),
2. Organize and overlay a kind of outline, plus more writing and beginning to revise,
3. More revising, read it aloud and clean it up,
4. Add Links and pictures, proofread.

Writing the Pomodoro Way

Summer and its more relaxed schedule is such a mixed blessing. I love not dragging my girls out of bed at six in the morning. This year we have several weeks with no camps at all, when I'll be working from home. It's lovely, even if the together time gets a little intense (queue the sibling squabbling). I write best on a strict schedule: that's what's great about the school year. In the past, I've played around with The Pomodoro Technique, but recently I've started using it more and I think it might just be my summer solution. 

I have to admit the first couple weeks of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, I was seriously struggling to meet my commitments. It's not just finding the time, another big part of the problem is that I'm working on longer projects. I didn't plan this, it seems to be just happening. I have no trouble diving into revisions for a 10 to 20 page story, but the one I'm currently working on is 45 pages and set to get longer.*

In fact, I'm using The Pomodoro Technique right now, to write this blog post. The idea is to just commit to 25 minutes at a time, with short breaks in between and longer ones every three to four Pomodoros. By keeping track of how many Pomodoros it takes to complete a project, I also have some data about how long it takes to, say, edit 60 pages. Data that will definitely help me plan my upcoming writing.

But the real strength of this technique, is that it helps me break through a particular emotional barrier that often causes me to put off work. It's the reluctance to even start on a project that is certainly too long and complex to accomplish in a couple of days. Instead of thinking of those 60 pages, where it seems every single sentence needs fixing and every other paragraph needs rearranging, I just focus on putting in 25 minutes. My obligation is no longer to revise this whole stack of pages, just to do what I can while the timer runs down.

I don't use the actual tomato timer pictured above. I don't think I could write through the ticking. I have Focus Booster on my computer which has a nice bar that changes from green to red to yellow as the time goes by. I have Focus Time on my iPod, this one costs a couple of dollars but there are some free ones also and, obviously, any timer will work. (Don't let me love of gadgets and apps deter you from trying this simple technique.)

So, if you have big projects but don't have big swaths of time, ** consider trying the Pomodoro Technique.


And now for something completely different. If you haven't read The Gyre yet, it is now available to read for free on The Colored Lens' website.

* Last week, I took the first 6,000 words (30 pages) of my current story to my Writers' Group. I got loads of valuable opinions. At the end, I asked the group if I should go shorter - try to pare it down to short story length, or go longer. Everyone said, "Longer!" Some even suggesting it could be a novel. I was all like, "Whoa, let's not get crazy here." But, I can see many points where I can expand this story to novella length. 

** Pretty much the foreseeable future for me.