![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
Keeping metrics and counts is often an important part of checking to make sure you're making progress toward the goal you have set in mind. Most projects that you will encounter as part of exchanges, short fiction markets, novels, and your own ideas will have suggestions or requirements that say what your target is in terms of minimums or maximums of wordcount. Some structures of storytelling have very strict requirements for words, as do many poetic forms, so if verse is your jam (and there are all sorts of great novels in verse that have been published, so don't think that it's impossible), you may be more acquainted with having to not only tell the story, but to do so in a way where everything has to fit the rhyme scheme, or to make sure the scansion falls on the right foot, or otherwise deal with additional requirements in addition to telling a good story. (For as much as we like to think of pop songs as insipid pieces of disposable trash, they still have to accomplish more than a few of the same goals that are in play for, say, Hamilton's bombastic and high-speed rap battles or Janelle Monae's concept albums.) All of this can be difficult to juggle while the other things, like plot, characterization, and the arc of the story are still hot in your head, and you want to get them down onto your medium of choice before they cool so much that they can't be worked nearly as easily.
So, one of the ideas that you can use with regard to count is to ignore it entirely until you have what you want to get out of your head done. This works pretty well when you're in the draft phases and there's still a lot more stuff to get out before the work has taken enough of a shape. When you're on a roll, just getting the words out can feel like progress enough. And then you can look back at your handiwork and smile for the wordcount that's been created.
Not every day, however, is a day where the words are going to flow freely, and sometimes you're going to want to (have to) grind out something to show that you've been using your time effectively, and that's where some of these tools come in handy.
I mentioned Written? Kitten! in the last post, and it's a good idea of what a motivating tool might look like - the default is set to show you a picture of a kitten every hundred words that you've written in their text box. (You can change that to other things if kittens are not your things. I'll bet there's a robust collection of doggos, bun-buns, hamsters, or whatever other tag you want to have appear every hundred words.) You can change the number of words to produce a kitten, if you feel like you only do so much before needing encouragement, or if you feel like there's some more writing that needs to be done before the cats start coming out. This is certainly not the only tool of this nature available, so if you have a better one, or a different one, and it works for you, go ahead and use it.
That said, there are more than a few people that want to get their writing done without the temptation of the Internet, their social media feeds, or other things getting in the way of producing words. So there are also ways of keeping track of your wordcount that are offline (and can be somewhat more permanent when that interruption happens that you have to go take care of, because it's reached the level of importance that it must be dealt with). One of the methods I liked was described, I believe, by Seanan McGuire, when asked about what methods get used when she's having a day where words have to get ground out instead of flowing out.
That does require paying attention to the word counter going up on your favorite program, if you have such a thing. (Most of my composition programs don't, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants until I get a draft done, and then I do a wordcount check to make sure that I've met the requirements, and then we go from there, to make things either bigger, smaller, or better. Often times, the idea is good enough to get within the requisite range by itself, but there are times where I've had to really figure out what was going on, and use some of the other tools in the box to explore new avenues that conveniently helped boost wordcount into the range that is needed. (Admittedly, I've also never attempted to tackle a NaNovel by itself - for that much writing, I'd need a really good idea, and I haven't hit one of those. Or I haven't had a string of those ideas go together enough to create a novel. Depending on how things go, if I end up writing enough of those individual vignettes, they might eventually look like they go together as chapters in a single work with a little polish and cleanup. It's always possible.)
Wordcount is often more important when you're writing to a deadline, whether for exchange, a NaNovel, or a piece you're being paid to write after the first one went over that well. If none of those things are in play, you can be a bit more relaxed about reaching the count that you need to, but again, the point is practice, and wordcount numbers often help you feel a sense of accomplishment. Wordcount has also been used as a sneaky way of figuring out when your most productive times of the day are. If you record when you're writing, and the amount of words that came out of that writing time, over time, a pattern will emerge that tells you when the best time of day for you is to carve out writing time and go to town with your ideas. They'll feed back into each other - finding the right time gives you more words, and getting more words at a particular time suggests that it's the right one for you to be using.
So how do you know when it's been a good day? If it's not a day where you finish a draft of something, it's often a good day if you've reached your wordcount goal for the day. And that's often raw words that you use - the editing and winnowing process that tightens the prose and turns it into something fabulous is still not happening yet, so that you're not strangling potential by trying to make it perfect before you make it complete.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]Keeping metrics and counts is often an important part of checking to make sure you're making progress toward the goal you have set in mind. Most projects that you will encounter as part of exchanges, short fiction markets, novels, and your own ideas will have suggestions or requirements that say what your target is in terms of minimums or maximums of wordcount. Some structures of storytelling have very strict requirements for words, as do many poetic forms, so if verse is your jam (and there are all sorts of great novels in verse that have been published, so don't think that it's impossible), you may be more acquainted with having to not only tell the story, but to do so in a way where everything has to fit the rhyme scheme, or to make sure the scansion falls on the right foot, or otherwise deal with additional requirements in addition to telling a good story. (For as much as we like to think of pop songs as insipid pieces of disposable trash, they still have to accomplish more than a few of the same goals that are in play for, say, Hamilton's bombastic and high-speed rap battles or Janelle Monae's concept albums.) All of this can be difficult to juggle while the other things, like plot, characterization, and the arc of the story are still hot in your head, and you want to get them down onto your medium of choice before they cool so much that they can't be worked nearly as easily.
So, one of the ideas that you can use with regard to count is to ignore it entirely until you have what you want to get out of your head done. This works pretty well when you're in the draft phases and there's still a lot more stuff to get out before the work has taken enough of a shape. When you're on a roll, just getting the words out can feel like progress enough. And then you can look back at your handiwork and smile for the wordcount that's been created.
Not every day, however, is a day where the words are going to flow freely, and sometimes you're going to want to (have to) grind out something to show that you've been using your time effectively, and that's where some of these tools come in handy.
I mentioned Written? Kitten! in the last post, and it's a good idea of what a motivating tool might look like - the default is set to show you a picture of a kitten every hundred words that you've written in their text box. (You can change that to other things if kittens are not your things. I'll bet there's a robust collection of doggos, bun-buns, hamsters, or whatever other tag you want to have appear every hundred words.) You can change the number of words to produce a kitten, if you feel like you only do so much before needing encouragement, or if you feel like there's some more writing that needs to be done before the cats start coming out. This is certainly not the only tool of this nature available, so if you have a better one, or a different one, and it works for you, go ahead and use it.
That said, there are more than a few people that want to get their writing done without the temptation of the Internet, their social media feeds, or other things getting in the way of producing words. So there are also ways of keeping track of your wordcount that are offline (and can be somewhat more permanent when that interruption happens that you have to go take care of, because it's reached the level of importance that it must be dealt with). One of the methods I liked was described, I believe, by Seanan McGuire, when asked about what methods get used when she's having a day where words have to get ground out instead of flowing out.
- Grab a six-sided die and keep it by your writing space.
- Each hundred words that you put down, turn the die one pip to the next.
That does require paying attention to the word counter going up on your favorite program, if you have such a thing. (Most of my composition programs don't, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants until I get a draft done, and then I do a wordcount check to make sure that I've met the requirements, and then we go from there, to make things either bigger, smaller, or better. Often times, the idea is good enough to get within the requisite range by itself, but there are times where I've had to really figure out what was going on, and use some of the other tools in the box to explore new avenues that conveniently helped boost wordcount into the range that is needed. (Admittedly, I've also never attempted to tackle a NaNovel by itself - for that much writing, I'd need a really good idea, and I haven't hit one of those. Or I haven't had a string of those ideas go together enough to create a novel. Depending on how things go, if I end up writing enough of those individual vignettes, they might eventually look like they go together as chapters in a single work with a little polish and cleanup. It's always possible.)
Wordcount is often more important when you're writing to a deadline, whether for exchange, a NaNovel, or a piece you're being paid to write after the first one went over that well. If none of those things are in play, you can be a bit more relaxed about reaching the count that you need to, but again, the point is practice, and wordcount numbers often help you feel a sense of accomplishment. Wordcount has also been used as a sneaky way of figuring out when your most productive times of the day are. If you record when you're writing, and the amount of words that came out of that writing time, over time, a pattern will emerge that tells you when the best time of day for you is to carve out writing time and go to town with your ideas. They'll feed back into each other - finding the right time gives you more words, and getting more words at a particular time suggests that it's the right one for you to be using.
So how do you know when it's been a good day? If it's not a day where you finish a draft of something, it's often a good day if you've reached your wordcount goal for the day. And that's often raw words that you use - the editing and winnowing process that tightens the prose and turns it into something fabulous is still not happening yet, so that you're not strangling potential by trying to make it perfect before you make it complete.
