I worked for almost an hour between the commuter van this afternoon and at the dining room table tonight and got just over 1,000 words down on Morpheus Rising. Not too many words added to the overall count, but it’s okay. My van writing was some revision to what I did last time I sat down, so I didn’t add many words there as much as I changed some words around and made them better. I was slowed at home tonight because I stopped a couple of times to do some research as I was writing. I’m not striving for letter-perfect accuracy here, but I figure I do want to get a couple of things right.
I’ve thought it over. After some great discussion the other night, I am looking at my goal-setting for each individual writing session. I’ve been very focused on word count as a goal–how many words did I write tonight? I’m still going to look at word count as an overall measure of my long-term performance and my accomplishments during the year as a whole. I do want to be accountable to a quantitative measure, and word count is the best way I know of, as a writer, to achieve that accountability.
In terms of what I do each day that I sit down, though, I am going to try to focus on the amount of productive time spent writing. Rather than look for, say 1,500 words in a session, I will look for at least one productive hour in a day, whether it is on the van, at home, or split between them as it was today. There is always going to be pressure on me as a writer because my word count goal is always looming ahead of me, but it helps to have that number out there as a guidepost. If I stay productive in my “one hour at a time” approach like I did last summer, I’ll meet my word count goals with ease and hopefully a lot less stress.
For what it’s worth, SF author Jay Lake posted an interesting article on his blog today about word count and his own interest in using it as a performance measure. You can read it here. He feels the same way I do about it, it seems, even if he is more devoted to word count as a day-to-day measure, which I am trying to get away from. It’s a nice article if you give it a read.
That’s it for now. I made some progress and I think I’ve had a bit of an epiphany as far as putting pressure on myself (or not) with realistic daily goals. I’m set up for a productive month, I think. Keep coming by and supporting and let’s see if I can manage to pull it off this time.
