I’ve got some kind of wordpress problem happening. It’s eating posts faster than I can write them. I seem to suddenly have two identities, which makes no sense to me. But I’ve logged in and in again, so I’m trying again.

I’m not rewriting my morning process post, though, so the short version is that my goal for today is 500 words that will fit somewhere in the book, not necessarily the next words for the next chapter.

999 words yesterday and why, I wonder, didn’t I just add one more to make it the thousand I aim for? No real answer, except that I got distracted and didn’t realize how close I’d come until this morning.

I did stumble across this great post at Catherine, Caffeinated, though (via The Passive Voice) that really resonated with me. She describes her writing as “bang out a few paragraphs, swim around in them for a few hours, tinkering and changing and rearranging, bang out a couple more, repeat as required” and I thought, ‘yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly how I write.’

For me, all writing is like that. WordPress has this revisions feature now, that tells you how many times a blog post as been revised. I haven’t looked at all of mine, but I think I run an average of about five to eight. I just can’t seem to simply start, write until I’ve said what I want to say, and then stop. I wish I could. But then, what I do mostly works for me. And it fits so beautifully with our just keep swimming mantra!

So, back to the pool. (Not literally, it’s finally feeling too cold for swimming. More hours to write, right?)

I did have the lovely experience yesterday of sending a friend a few hundred words of what I was working on and having him text me back “wow, that’s good.” It gives me a nice little glow of pleasure as I dive back into that chapter.

I got stuck yesterday. I finished a chapter with a couple of hundred words, then realized that even though I knew what was coming soon, I didn’t know what was next. So I spent some time organizing — going back and reminding myself of my loose threads and what needed to be tied together, working out which characters needed to be in which scenes, trying to decide the order of events and the timing for them. I wound up with about five open documents, three short sketches of scenes, an outline and character notes and a slightly different plan for the rest of the book. I have one piece of plot puzzle that I haven’t quite figured out and I really need to get that settled, but it stumped me yesterday so I moved on to scenes. I don’t know what my total word count was, but definitely less than 1000. Still, it was probably at least 500 and by my more recent standards, that marks it as a decent day.

And decent is better than nothing. Onward!

25.

Yep, not the most successful of days yesterday. I hadn’t slept and I couldn’t figure out how to string the words together in sentences that made any sense.

That said, I did write three blog posts, so it wasn’t as if I did nothing. And the occasional day spent wandering the house in a blur of exhaustion is inevitable.

Today’s writing is dialog and I’m going to have to work hard not to make it come across as an info dump. I’ll be answering some of the big questions about my MacGuffin on my way to the (we hope) tension-filled climax.

Someone linked to this blog this morning, which was sorta weird, since I don’t think of the blog as being particularly public. We’ve only been writing here for a little while, so it’s tough to see how we could be in search engines already. But the gist of the link questioned word count as a valuable measure of writing. I’m not going to link back to it, because frankly, I think it was just link-bait, a basic SEO technique, and after glancing at the blog, I didn’t find it interesting enough that I care to promote it. (For non-web folks, SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization, a way to get a higher ranking on search engine results.)

But I did think about it for a few minutes (in, I admit, a patronizing, pat-on-the-head, poor-boy-doesn’t-get-it kind of way.) The fact is, word count is a measure of practice. Writing is a craft, a learned skill, and the more you practice, the better you should get. That’s not necessarily true, of course–you can spew words indefinitely without ever improving if you’re not actually working on trying to get better. But mostly, the more you write, the better you’ll get. 

So why measure word count instead of time spent? Because writing the words is how you get better. And it’s really, really easy as a writer to say, “oh, I worked for three hours yesterday,” when what you actually did was spend two hours researching (aka browsing the web) and another hour plotting (aka daydreaming). And those hours may be important, but they’re not how you improve the skill of building sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters.

An artist might spend an hour mixing paints. Is that useful? Sure. But it doesn’t improve their drawing skill. A musician might spend an hour messing around with the buttons on their recording software. A necessary job? Maybe. But it’s not practicing chords, it’s not learning how to play. Word count measures an accomplishment. It measures the fact that you sat down and did the job, built the sentences, shaped them into paragraphs.

And the idea that the word count doesn’t matter if the words aren’t good is like a musician thinking her time spent is only valuable when she’s playing a symphony. Musicians know better than that. Practicing chords is useful. Noodling around is useful. Learning new music, useful. Time spent practicing matters, because that’s how our skill grows. And in writing, that’s time spent actually producing words. Polishing the words, perfecting them, that’s a job for after you’ve actually written them.

So, word count yesterday: 1033. And if that sounds to you like I hit 1000 with a sigh of relief and quit for the day, you’d be quite right. But 1000 words written when it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t easy is more of an accomplishment than 10 beautiful, perfect stellar words. (Except, I guess, if I was writing poetry!)

So yesterday wasn’t the most productive writing day. I did manage to finish my beta read and send it off, but post-yoga, I went grocery shopping. Instead of getting writing-inspired, I got cooking-inspired. Made a spicy tuna volcano for dinner and it was YUM, but I didn’t get a lot of writing done before going out to my evening appointment, and only managed a few more words after coming home and eating dinner.

That was yesterday, though, and today’s another chance to do better. (Yeah, I could be a motivational speaker, couldn’t I? LOL.) Anyway, aiming for 1000 today and hoping for more. I going to be making another fun dinner — seared tuna steak on mixed greens, but I’ve got plenty of hours to get good writing done first.

Today’s going to be a busy day for me, so I’m going to adjust my goals downward accordingly. I’ve been working on a beta read for a friend, so I’m going to try to finish that this morning. Beta reads can be challenging: I never know whether I’m being so critical that I will be discouraging or providing the kind of intense feedback that’s hard to get. Anyone can read a story and say, “Oh, I liked it,” and that’s nice, of course–we all want our work to be liked–but it’s much harder to find people who will question our assumptions and be specific about our characterizations. In this case, I suspect I’ve crossed the line into discouraging, so after I finally finish the beta read, I’ll probably go through and tone it down a bit. So that’s Goal 1 for the day.

Second goal: at least 500 words. I’ve got two outside-the-house activities today, so my writing will be disrupted. On a typical recent day, that’s meant no writing at all. I want to do better than that, but I’m not going to be so ambitious that I try for 1000.