Category: Learning curve

Posts in which I discuss things I’ve learned or need to learn about any of many topics.

Grandiose plans, despair and discouragement

Lynn

I have a problem. Confession time. I set very unreasonable and unrealistic goals for myself every time I sit down to write. The problem is that I want to write so many books and so many stories and I have no patience with myself. So, although I know my average wph (and it’s nothing like the 1000 wph bandied about here and elsewhere by the supposed average writer) and how many hours I can stay focused on writing, I still build up these grandiose plans in my head and on paper and in spreadsheets that are completely unreasonable and unrealistic for me. And when that finally settles in a day or a week later, I face despair and discouragement.

Telling myself I can do less and I should be happy with that does nothing but make me less happy. I don’t want those limits and I hate them. I writhe and twist against them, until soon enough I’m right back to making the grandiose plans and disgusted with myself when they fall through yet again.

I wish I could say I had found a way to get past all this, but I haven’t. I have no helpful tips for anyone facing the same. I have accepted this about myself and I will continue to do my best to become the writer I want to be, even if that means facing despair and discouragement.

Is the schedule improving my daily word count average (for real)?

Lynn

I was ready to do a bit more analysis of whether or not my schedule is helping me write more. This time I decided to get real and use a formula to figure out if the change I noted previously was actually statistically significant. It’s been so long since I’ve had a statistics class that I had to turn to the web for answers. One web search later, I found THIS, which I adapted quite easily to work with my daily log of word counts.

I had noted the start date for the schedule in my daily log, so it was easy to make the formulas work with my own spreadsheet. Here’s what I came up with.

658 average value of data before change (daily word counts)
741 average value of data since change (daily word counts)
952 standard deviation of data since change
133 number of data points since change (how many days I’ve been on the schedule)
1.009489 T-Value
15.73% probability that the change is only due to chance

So, I wouldn’t say the change in word count is significant. After a bit of further reading on Wikipedia, the problem I’m seeing is that I have no idea what to set as the significance level. I can’t deny that it’s quite possible the increase in my word count was/is temporary and could have other causes. The truth is that my word counts often improve after I make a change. And honestly, if I look at a rolling 7 day average, I can’t see any patterns at all.

Other than the pattern that sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I don’t write anything! Consistency isn’t something I’m good at.

I did have several more 3,000 word days recently than usual (I’ve never had three of them so close together before), but on the other hand, it had to happen sometime, right? I now have 1,112 days worth of entries and I’m adding a new one every day.

All I’ve really done is give myself something else to think about, unfortunately, while I try to pull myself out of this funk and get on with the writing.

My daily word count has increased since I began following a schedule

Lynn

I had a theory that my daily word count hadn’t increased with my schedule because of how often I seem to be missing the mark when it comes to actually sticking to it.

I was wrong. :)

I wanted the numbers to back up my theory and they didn’t. I then found myself wanting to adjust the parameters of my analysis but realized almost immediately that this would be an attempt to make the numbers prove what I wanted them to prove. So I stepped back to give this some more thought.

I realized I was probably just looking for justification to abandon my schedule. I’ve since moved on (that post yesterday was written after I started this one). I’m glad I resisted!

Although my overall daily average is still down from 2012 and 2013, it’s better than 2014 and even the all time average up until the date I began following the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule.

Since I began the 9–12 & 1–4 schedule: 744 words a day average
All time before the schedule: 658 words a day average

It’s enough of a difference that I can’t ignore it. I wasn’t very productive in 2014 or the early part of 2015 and the schedule has clearly saved me from more of the same.

The only other thing of note is that my daily average for the time period during which I used the 5 minute sessions was just over 1,400 words a day. I was trying to hit a deadline during that time and I was scheduling my 5 minute sessions in one hour blocks and scheduling 5 or 6 of those hour long blocks every day. I take this to mean that if I can stick my current schedule more often and get in the 5 to 6 hours of writing, I can hope to approach or exceed these same numbers without the stress of the timed writing. :) I would still like to see myself reach a daily average of 2,000 words because that would fit with the life I want. :)

 

Knowing something needs doing will have to be enough

Lynn

My response to the pressure that deadlines create? Complete and total shutdown. I don’t deal well with anxiety, stress, overwhelming goals or odds, or pressure. I used to believe I worked better under pressure, but I think that’s just something I told myself after the fact because I had come up against a hard deadline that left me no wiggle room and I had finally overcame the inertia holding me back and got down to business. In a limited sense, I do work better under pressure—because outside pressure can actually make me work whereas I might not work otherwise. As far as quality of that work, well, there’s just no way to know. Doing something is better than doing nothing in most cases, so there you go.

The problem with writing as a career is that there are almost no hard deadlines. Even when something has been promised to a publisher, most writers know they can ask for an extension if they ask soon enough. How hard you consider a publisher’s deadline will greatly depend on how concerned you are with your reputation and how important your self-image as a promise-keeper is to you.

I don’t know how I’d handle it, to be honest, but I have this fear that if I weren’t my own publisher, I’d be in trouble. I generally keep promises, if I see the sense in it and if I care about the person to whom I made the promise, but if I can rationalize it away, then all bets are off. I rarely bend over backwards to make most other people’s lives easier than my own.

I hope this is the last post I ever write about this topic, because I’ve come to a realization today. I have to stop setting personal deadlines and goals and start focusing on just doing the work day in and day out. Consistency is going to be key for me, because I’m not looking for goals: I’m looking for a way of life. At this moment in time, I want my fiction to be the way I earn my living until the day I die. I’m not saying that’ll never change, because I’d like to live a long time and have a long life and maybe that’ll mean I come up on the day when I’m ready for something different. But that’s not today, and I doubt it’ll be next week or next year.

I want to get up each day and I want to write. Some days it’s obvious I’ll write more than others, but overall, I want to write every day and I want a routine that makes it easy to do.

I can’t keep stressing over the goals that I’m not even supposed to be worried about right now, because I’ve got the schedule. The schedule is not working well at the moment, but I’m not giving up on it. It’ll be the backbone of my writing routine.

This post came about because of the aforementioned realization. I was choking under the pressure of the production schedule I created when I decided to focus on my income producing series.

Today, I had to face what I’ve been doing to myself. I made that schedule to see if I could squeeze in the other books I want to write alongside the ones I need to write if I’m serious about focusing on growing my income for a while. Of course, it became a ridiculous expression of everything I know is wrong with the way I think sometimes. I had input deadlines for every book I want to write between now and next year and I had compressed those deadlines to the point that I was going to have to write more words every day than I’d ever written in my life and maintain that pace for weeks at a time.

To remind you, if I focus on my income producing series to the exclusion of my other books, I can write half the number of books in the same time period and yet in all probability earn more money. There’s just no world in which this isn’t the smart thing for me to do, knowing how slow I write.

And yet, there I was this morning, staring at that production schedule and wondering why I’ve been having so much trouble getting myself to write since I created it. It should have been inspiring, I told myself, because it showed what I could accomplish if I just buckled down.

But it wasn’t.

My sanity returned after a flurry of scribbled notes and much too much time spent trying to make it work out to a smaller, more reasonable daily word count average. It’s never going to work out. I just can’t count on myself to write at a steady pace each day and I can’t work to these deadlines. The reason I love writing for a living is because I can take the daily ups and downs I naturally experience and smooth them out into what will become the whole. A book is a book when it’s done; it doesn’t matter if I wrote 1000 words a day for 50 days or if I wrote 0 words for 25 days and 2000 a day for the rest, because I still end up with my book. I can count on my averages. I can’t count on much else.

I don’t want to stop trying to improve my averages, and I’ll still keep trying to stick with my schedule as best I can. I want to improve. But I don’t want to do it with deadlines hanging over my head.

And that’s all I really wanted to say today.

Increasing my daily word count average

Lynn

It’s time I started to focus on increasing my daily word count average. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, something I’ve been writing about here, off and on, for more than a year. (That link goes to all the posts I tagged with the relevant tag. They started back in April 2014.)

Two things I’ll need to do to increase my daily word count average—

  1. increase my writing speed
  2. improve my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction

Despite the popular notion that all it takes to write faster is to spend more time writing, those are two distinctly different things as far as I’m concerned. There’s writing more and there’s writing faster. Writing faster means increasing my speed, and my writing speed is how many words I write during a specific unit of time. Increasing the amount of time I spend writing doesn’t change my speed.

I’ve realized over the last few months that even though I say I’ve given up on the idea of writing faster in favor of writing more, that’s not exactly true. I do want to write faster, because there are just so many stories I want to write, and I want to have written them already! It’s unfortunate that I can’t go back in time and make that happen. ;) The next best thing is to get them written as fast as I can.

As for improving my ability to write for longer periods of time without tiring out or succumbing to boredom or distraction, I’m still working on it. Right now, with the success I’m having with the schedule, I’m definitely writing more on the days when I stick to it. So to accomplish item #2 on the list, I’ll just keep pushing myself to stick as close to my schedule as possible. Six hours of writing each day is enough. Anything over five hours of actual writing is going to make me happy.

That leaves me with trying to figure out how I can increase my writing speed. For the next few weeks at least, I’m going to be recording my efforts to do just that.

I want to be a prolific writer

Lynn

What do I want more: To write a few really good books or to write lots and lots of books?

I actually know how to answer that. I want to write lots and lots of books. One of my lifelong dreams is to be a prolific writer.

If someone asked me if I’d rather look back at the end of my life and know I’d created one book that had dearly affected millions of people or if I’d rather say I’d written 482 books, I’d say “I wrote 482 book!” I have no idea what drives me to make that choice but that is definitely the choice I’d make. I have a feeling that says a lot about me as a person. ;) Oops.

However, if I actually want that to happen, I’m going to have to stop spending so much time fiddling with my writing when I write. A prolific writer can’t spend an entire day coming up with 500 words. The math just doesn’t work out.

Besides which, I have got to start managing my time better so I can fit in all the things I supposedly want to do. I say supposedly because sometimes I have a tendency to hang on to the idea that I should do something when I don’t actually want to do it. I really need to get over that.

Also, I need to clip my nails. Just typing this is driving me crazy. :D Ah, the rituals I must go through to get into the writing zone, even when it’s just my blog!

Here’s my plan: Start writing more freely! I know I keep saying that. I even read a book about it (Writing in Overdrive covers the topic quite nicely). But yes, I’m really going to have to commit to doing it. I can’t really define what’s stopping me most of the time, except maybe fear that I’ll write something terrible or stupid or inconsistent with something I wrote earlier in the story (which does happen!). Whatever the reason, it’s time I stopped.

One thing I’m going to do to practice this is to stop rereading these posts and editing them so much before I put them up. From now on, expect to see a lot more of my natural writing style here. Practice. That’s where it’s at. Time to break some habits. ;)

 

Change of plans

Lynn

I’ll keep this short. The summer isn’t turning out to be a great environment for my schedule. After some consideration, I’ve decided to scale back to a 9 am to 1 pm schedule. Out of the last 31 days, I’ve held to the schedule 4 days total. The other days have been scattershot and fairly unproductive. I had to face the fact that the schedule just hasn’t been working since the summer school break started (just about 30 days ago).

Also, strangely enough, the change in my lunch time pattern has contributed to me gaining a few pounds that I don’t want. I’m taking this opportunity to fall back into my former eating pattern of larger breakfast and larger, later lunch, and little or no supper (because I don’t usually get hungry before bedtime with this pattern). I loved the schedule I had, but that meal time disruption has kind of turned out to be a big deal and I do blame it for the weight gain, so instead of getting rid of the schedule and falling back into the wrong kind of habits, I’m just making a necessary adjustment.

Better than before? Absolutely

Lynn

The “no internet” before 4 pm worked. It was SO HARD, but I did it, and I wrote during my scheduled writing time and ended the day with 2,910 words. And I think I wrote the end of the book I’ve been stuck on. :D I need to write the wrap up chapter tomorrow, so I’ll probably read at least the last couple of chapters tonight or in the morning and see how I feel about them. If I’m right, and I wrote the ending today, I’ll be ecstatic. I’m ready to get this one published and move on.

I feel so relieved. I just hope I’m not jumping the gun on this and that I’m really done. The wrap up chapter will finish tying up loose ends and set the next book in motion.

I learned something today. I learned that all that anxiety and angst I was having about something being wrong with my book was bullshit. :D I just didn’t want to sit down and write. I couldn’t sit down and write, tbh, but that’s still an issue with my brain and my ability to concentrate, stay on task, and overcome procrastination issues brought on by my impulsive nature. I was placing blame where it didn’t need to be placed. The book was fine.

I hope I remember this next time I have this problem. Obviously wasting a lot of time worrying about my book didn’t help at all and won’t likely help in the future.

Better than before? Not yet, but maybe soon

Lynn

I finally finished reading Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (by Gretchen Rubin). I liked the book overall, and I’m trying to decide what I can take away from it that might help me get back on track with my writing. I’m so far behind right now!

The end of this month will mark the halfway point in this year. I’m sitting right on the 100,000 word mark for the year; that’s about 400,000 words shy of where I’d like to be. No way I’m making that up. But that doesn’t mean I have to give up the second half of the year. I can still end the year strong if I can just get back on track.

I’d blame the summer break for this, but I suspect the blame belongs on a few bad habits I let slip back into my life. May was a great month for me with the latest book release, and instead of using the 7–9 block of time in the morning for reading fiction, I fell back into an old habit of checking sales reports first thing in the morning. That led me to spending time on the internet when I should have been reading fiction and getting myself into a creative frame of mind before I needed to sit down and write at 9 am.

While on the internet this morning, I watched Garrett Robinson’s latest Writer Wednesday video and I think he’s got the right idea about the internet. I have no illusions that I’ll EVER write 50,000 words in 3 days without a miracle happening, but I do know I’ve been letting the internet distract me.

In Better Than Before, Rubin talks about the “four tendencies” which she calls Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel. Although I have a few traits from all of them, I’m without a doubt a questioner. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I believe it means I need to believe in the reason(s) I have for adopting a new habit before I’ll be able to make a new habit stick. That makes sense.

I have a lot of really good reasons why I should stay away from the internet during the day, especially when I should be writing. None of the reasons I have for not staying away from the internet trump any of those good reasons.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to stay off the internet until after 4 pm every day. No internet during lunch. No quick email checking. No checking sales reports, or distracting myself with forums and blogs.

After 4 pm I can do what I want. Before 4 pm? I don’t use the internet.

If I need to research something to keep going in my story (something that’s very rare), I’ll just switch to another story and write that instead, then research after 4 pm. I think the fewer exceptions I allow, the better.

For the questioner in me: The internet is my go-to drug of choice when it comes time to find a distraction to keep me from having to push through tough spots in my stories. If I want to be prolific, I can’t make it easy for myself to find these distractions. At least with what’s left (doing dishes, washing laundry, watering my garden), I have a tangible benefit to allowing the distraction. With the internet, I usually have nothing to show for the distraction except frustration. :D

This is going to be one tough habit to create—at least as hard as my schedule habit has been to maintain these last few weeks, but I think I can do it. :D If I do, it’ll be so worth it. Less stress, less guilt, more writing!

And what internet time I do get, maybe I’ll enjoy it more in the long run and use it more wisely. :D

Trying to work around the schedule

Lynn

It’s my biggest wish to be able to keep to the writing schedule while I go through the motions of preparing to publish a book. I can’t say that I’m winning the first round in that fight.

I’ve just finished a cover that literally took me the longest it’s ever taken me to make a cover. I broke down at one point and drafted an email to the designers of a cover I had made for a book for a different pen name, because this experience was just so bad that I couldn’t imagine trying to do another one. I hate designing covers. Honestly, I just hate it. I think I know why. I really don’t like doing stuff I’m not good at, and I can’t seem to get good at making covers. They’re all just passable. Adequate. And tbh, I’m so tired of that.

Because of that cover taking three days instead of the 5 to 6 hours I expected, I’ve written much less than I wanted to write over the last three days. I stuck to my schedule half the day Friday. None on Saturday. Half again, today. I’ve racked up just under 2,000 words for those days total. If not for the schedule, I know in my heart I wouldn’t even have that.

So yay! Another win for the schedule.

Tomorrow (kids will be in school) I attempt to stick the schedule again, while making time before and after to edit the book I’m preparing to publish and maybe even get to the formatting. Boy am I going to be busy…

This might be my best schedule ever

Lynn

I enjoyed another day of writing on a schedule today. The easy success of the last few days has made me think, wondering what the difference is between this schedule and those that came before. I finally think I’ve come up with several reasons to explain why it might be the best one ever.

  • I start later. 9 am is quite late for me. I’m usually up at 6 on weekdays but I sometimes sleep later on weekends. 9 am means the schedule works no matter which day it is without adjustment. Usually, I set up schedules that start really early and I’m always making adjustments.
  • The break between 12 and 1 is only an hour. Meaning I have less time to prepare food and less time to get sucked into watching TV or reading a book once I sit down to eat. Because I’m eating less at mid-day, I don’t get so sleepy afterward. Usually, I set up schedules with big breaks so I’m more rested when I get back to it. Unfortunately, I’m usually too rested and don’t want to!
  • I don’t have a quota or run the timers so the only pressure I have is the pressure to stick to the schedule. Usually, I have competing pressures because I usually do set word count goals and I run the timer and keep track of how much I produce. That’s a lot of added pressure. It’s nice being able to just focus on sticking to the schedule.

Anyway, I thought I had another reason but I can’t remember it just yet. If I do, I’ll add it. :)

Reasons matter: a rambling essay

Lynn

I’ve decided many times over that a schedule is a bad idea for me. It occurred to me today that my reason for this isn’t exactly rational: A schedule puts me in a position of having to consciously face the fact that I’m choosing not to do something I’ve already decided I need to do, something I know I need to do.

I’m undisciplined when it comes to work (tbh, I’m undisciplined about most everything in my life). Deadlines don’t help. I still don’t usually become inspired to work until the very last moment and only the most serious of consequences is enough to get me going soon enough that I’m not absolutely scrambling at the last moment to get done on time.

This makes me ill suited to the career I’ve picked for myself, I know. It’s a struggle, but it’s worth it because I love earning my living by writing fiction.

I’ve tried to come up with some kind of system that doesn’t hang on goals but that’s just a mind-bending exercise in futility. You can’t have a system without goals of some kind. It’s impossible. I’ve tried to come up with a system that relies on me aiming at a targeted word count, but I keep coming back to the fact that I put it off until the end of the day and I just can’t get enough done in the time I end up with. I decided I would write until lunch every day; then I watched myself not start writing until lunch and wow, I sure produced a lot of words getting started ten minutes before I was supposed to quit (sarcasm alert!).

I’ve tried relying on my love of writing to keep me going without goals but my natural tendencies toward procrastination make that a terrible idea; I’ve failed miserably to get any appreciable amount of writing done at all without them.

But then when I set goals and I fail to meet them, I feel bad. I mean, really bad.

Setting goals based on things out of your control is never a good idea. And I can’t control my word counts. I can’t know how well the writing is going to go for any particular scene, book, day, hour, or month. Sometimes it goes well, and sometimes, I delete more than I write.

It’s hard to remember that word counts are out of my control. Sure, I remember right now, but will I remember tomorrow or next week when my deadline is closing in on me? Probably not.

A word count quota is the kind of goal that feels completely rational and within my control, until I have a bad day and manage 200 words in four hours because I had to delete a ton of work and couldn’t get moving on what was left. Then I feel like I’ve failed at something that should have been easy, and even though I know rationally that this is silly, the irrational parts of me (and there are a lot of those!) do not care. In the least.

There’s only one path left for me and the only reason I have for not taking it is because I see it as a failure.

If I loved writing, wouldn’t I want to do it all the time?

I feel dumb writing that out because I’ve known for a long time that working to your passions doesn’t mean you’ll never have to make yourself work again.

I love writing. I love having written. I love publishing my books. When I’m in the mood. Sadly, I’m not in the mood as often as I should be. In fact, I’m not in the mood a whole hell of a lot of the time because I tend toward moodiness as a general rule. And yet, if anyone cares to know, writing fiction is the one thing I’ve loved almost my entire life and it irks me that there’s someone out there that’s going to read this and say: “Well, she just doesn’t love it enough or she wouldn’t have to make herself do it.”

I need a schedule and I know it. Even if I can’t stick with the schedule most of the time and even if I choose on more days than not to skip writing, at least I’ll have some framework to keep me aimed in the right direction.

A system is made up of goals and habits, and habits can form around schedules more easily than they can form around random events that occur throughout the day.

So here’s the challenge. I’m going to make a schedule. Every day will be a challenge to stick to it. I’ll probably fail more often than I succeed. Maybe if I’m lucky some good habits will develop around the times I’m supposed to be writing that will make it work over the long-term even if I have a lot of short-term failures. If not, well, how’s it any worse than what I’ve already got going on?

No more searching for the best system, no more word count quotas or goal-setting, no more excuses. It’s time to move on from all that and settle in. The remainder of 2015 is going to be the year of the schedule.

The only requirement for myself is that if I choose not to write during the times I’m supposed to write, I have to admit that to myself. It’s a choice and I need to be responsible for it.

I won’t stop myself from writing outside the scheduled times, but if I don’t write when I’m scheduled to write and end up not writing as much as I should, I want to end the day knowing I had an obligation to myself and that I chose not to meet it.

I can’t keep avoiding the one system that is guaranteed to give me the opportunity to write more just because I’ll have to face how often I choose to fail.

Systems are made up of goals

Lynn

Systems are made up of goals. I’ve been thinking on this a lot the past week or so, after doing quite a bit of reading about goals and systems. I was having a difficult time working through certain ideas, the main one being that goals are somehow inherently different than systems (and they might be, but not in the way you think). Don’t set goals, some people say. Create systems instead. Work the system and all will be well.

Except… I couldn’t stop thinking that this doesn’t make any sense. How can you create a system that takes you where you want to go if you don’t have some vague idea of where that might be (a goal)? No matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a system that didn’t have goals built right into it.

Then it occurred to me that so many of these articles gloss right over the fact that goals come in all sizes and scopes. As soon as I realized that, I also realized that the authors of all these articles are trying to redefine what a goal is so that they can separate goals from systems—and by doing so, essentially claiming that most small goals (the daily kind) aren’t goals at all.

That’s not how I see it. A goal’s a goal, whether it’s the concrete goal of writing 100 words in the next 20 minutes, of writing every day, of sticking to a writing schedule, of writing 1,000,000 words over the next year, or the more abstract goal of just doing your best to write as often as possible.

I know now why this concept of systems versus goals didn’t want to sink in, why it didn’t make sense to me: every example I’ve found of a system is just a collection of ever smaller goals that for some unfathomable reason no one wants to call goals.

Finally, the systems versus goal debate makes sense (a focus on small goals versus one large goal).

Whew. I feel better. ;D

Now that the issue of semantics is past, I can focus on the real issue: setting up my goals as a system so that they make it easy to get where I want to go without setting myself up for failure.

What kind of system will inevitably lead to the future I want without me having to commit to a win/lose scenario such as “write 5 or 8 or 12 books this year?”

Smaller goals make it more likely I’ll have frequent wins, and lots of small wins are more motivating than one huge win (and honestly, how often do we get these huge wins even when we do the best we can?). Lots of small wins equals more motivation, and failing to reach a huge goal can definitely be demotivating if one doesn’t view it in the right light (and how often do we do that?).

How can I set myself up for lots of small wins when I already have experience that says if I aim for a daily quota I’m just going to disappoint myself? That, unfortunately, is going to require some more thought.

Changing my assumptions about my writer self

Lynn

I’ve been thinking about the fact that I need to become more productive with my writing. This is my full-time career and I need to be more cognizant of that fact sometimes. I’m not really sure how to move forward though because I’ve tried all the usual stuff over the last two and a half years: rigid schedules, flexible schedules, word quotas, book quotas, time quotas, all of that, and I still haven’t broken through my own resistance to regular, consistent, daily writing. I’m honestly at a bit of a loss as to what to do. None of those methods have helped me at all. There doesn’t seem to be anything left to try. Right now I’m just trying to focus on the enjoyment I get from writing, hoping that will make a difference. Do I just give up and accept that I write as fast as I write and that’s it?

I read something recently about challenging assumptions. Maybe that’s what I should focus on. I should challenge my assumptions about myself as a writer.

Assumption: I’m a slow writer.

Am I a slow writer? Let’s see: I had to refer to my archived time data (I stopped logging time on 3/18/2015), but a few formulas later, and I see something a bit surprising.

I wrote more than 500 words an hour 56% of the time, more than 800 words an hour 17% of the time, and more than 1,000 words an hour 5% of the time. Is that slow?

I see the 1,000 words an hour figure dropped regularly by other writers, and I have no way of knowing what kind of copy they turn out: finished or rough draft work. I don’t guess it really matters, because almost anyone I know considers a novel a month fast. 2,000–4,000 words a day is what it would take for that, writing the way I do (clean drafts, final copy). 56% of the time I can write 2,000 words in less than 4 hours. So 56% of the time I can produce at a highly prolific pace, working less than 4 hours a day.

This belief that I’m a slow writer doesn’t seem to have a lot of basis in reality.

Really, this just emphasizes that I need to worry a lot less about how fast I write and worry instead about how often I write.

I don’t write often enough and I don’t stick with it long enough. That’s the crux of the problem I’ll need to solve if I want to be prolific.

Word count has become my biggest obstacle

Lynn

My daily word count has become my biggest obstacle over the last few years. I’m not sure exactly when it started to overtake every other writing concern I have, but it has and I’m not feeling great about that. I know my daily word counts are important. They’re intricately tied to success as measured by revenue because you can’t sell what isn’t written.

However, I’m also feeling a bit like the excessive focus on word count has had some side effects that I’m not really happy with, the biggest and scariest of which is a diminishing enjoyment of writing.

I know I need something to keep me going in the right direction, but … some days this need to measure everything just gets old. I want to love writing so much that I can’t wait to get started and hate to have to stop. Some days I still feel like this. Less so lately though. It’s hard for me to love writing when I’m constantly disappointed in myself because of writing.

Still, although I’ve axed my timer and my time data (archived it, to be exact), I won’t be abandoning my daily log of my word count. I love having that list of numbers. What I don’t love is looking at it and feeling bad about myself when there’s a blip where the numbers drop or a zero shows up.

On the other hand, I do love a good writing streak. For the moment, I’m going to focus on writing every day (that getting started thing is really important) and worry less about the actual quota. I want to end up with a nice average, but “average” means I don’t have to be so hard on myself for any particular day’s word count if I have a reasonable mix of bad days and good days.

What I’m learning: Consistency is important, but it’s probably better if I’m not rigid about it. I want to write every day, but some days are going to be more fun than others and it’s going to be easier to stay at it longer. We’ll see where that gets me in April.

Why I don’t offer writing tips (most of the time)

Lynn

I’ve been writing for about twenty-five years. It’s really funny that fifteen years ago, I had a site devoted to giving out writing tips. Nowadays I don’t feel qualified to give out writing tips, despite the length of time I’ve been writing fiction. Or maybe it’s that I’ve learned in the meantime that writing tips are a bit worthless. I only discovered true happiness with writing when I finally tossed aside all the tips that had taken up residence inside my head and wrote what I wanted, how I wanted. Sadly, that’s only been in the last ten years or so.

I freely admit that maybe I needed those tips at the time so that I could become the writer I am today. Then again, maybe they delayed my development as a writer. I’ll likely never know.

I also freely admit that I am far from done learning how to write. The difference these days is that I learn from reading others and practicing my own craft, trying to find ways to get the words out so they translate best to the biggest portion of my reading audience. (You can never please everyone, and you’ll go mad if you try.) That’s not to say I don’t read select craft books, because I do. But I avoid the kind of tips that proliferate online in favor of in-depth discussions of topics meant to help writers write good stories.

How can I offer advice to others when I still have so much to learn?

Still, sometimes I want to say to some writers I see scouring the forums and blogs for the secret to better writing: Stop! Just write. Write and write and write, and complete things. Even the terrible things. Finish those stories you start, because that’s how I learned. I took a giant leap forward when I finally started finishing the stories I started.

In the end, though, I have no idea if what worked for me will work for them. Maybe they need those tips. Or maybe they’re just delaying their own development as writers. We’ll likely never know.

I don’t offer writing tips because I don’t feel qualified. I know only what works for me as a reader and a writer. And I use adverbs when I want and I write run on sentences and I quite often mix my metaphors. But it’s what I want and how I want and my writing hasn’t been the same since. It’s lovely to own your art as uniquely yours.

Trying not to fall back into old habits

Lynn

I cut my morning session short. I’m trying not to fall back into old habits here but I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the last hour and seven minutes of writing this morning. Afternoon really, since the writing started late and I broke for lunch and that was what got me. I watched the new episode of Castle as a treat during lunch and … that led to more tv because tv is always more appealing that trying to get through a tough spot in my book. :(

Anyway, I’m back at it for my evening session. I’m just starting fresh with the 2h 5m and trying to finish that—maybe I’ll be lucky enough to really get moving on this book. I can catch up without having to finish that extra hour tonight if I can write 765 wph tonight. I won’t be caught up with yesterday’s missing words but I’ll at least not be any further behind. To catch up totally, I’ll have to write 1,025 wph tonight. I’m going to try, I mean why not?, but it might take more inspiration than I’ve got at the moment!

Trying anyway. :D

Novel feels like it’s going to go long

Lynn

I aim for about 50,000 words when I write a novel. I can’t say I have a lot of luck keeping to that word count. The story usually ends up bigger because I don’t like to let my characters have wild changes of heart without a darn good reason. I believe change is hard and honestly, I believe most people never change and those who do fight for it tooth and nail.

Now, since I can’t really divorce myself completely from my characters, when I’m writing one that has to change in a big way before his story is done, I end up having to write more to make it happen. This seems to be what’s happening in this book. My main character has taken the first steps to change, but the fact is, he’s not there yet and I have a LOT of story left to squeeze into 20,000 words. :o

I’m going to try, because I always do, but I have a feeling this one’s going to get away from me.

Nope, challenge is a no-go

Lynn

I felt a ton of resistance to writing yesterday and today, and I blame it 100% on the challenge. I have a good thing going with the new routine of morning and evening writing and I’ve decided I’m not going to mess it up right now. I can get close enough to the date I’d like to finish this current book just by sticking with my minimum (doing both the morning and evening sessions) so that’s what I’m going to do. I just don’t want to risk ruining a good thing.

And honestly, I don’t mind failing if I’ve learned something, and I think I have. I’ve learned that I do my best writing when I don’t feel like it’s work I’m doing and that having my day free is one way to make myself feel like I’m not working. :D

So, this challenge/experiment is over, and here shortly I’m going to try to finish off the day with what I hope will be my first successful attempt at completing an evening session. :)

Still having trouble with that evening session

Lynn

I didn’t get back to my writing yesterday, despite knowing I really needed to. I’m not sure what’s going on. Well, scratch that, because I sat down last night with my computer at 7:45 (15 minutes later than planned) but my kids were in the room and they kept talking to me and I kept waiting to get started until they settled down for the evening, but they never did. One decided she needed to tell me all about her day after not telling me about her day from 4:30 to 7:45 when I actually asked, and the other decided he wanted supper after all and started cooking in the kitchen behind me (my downstairs floor plan is very open).

I told them their evening routine was going to have to change—no more cooking after 7:30 when bedtime is 9 to 10 because of school the next day (they’re actually back in school today!). My daughter wasn’t too keen on changing her routine to fit mine, until she realized the only thing I expected from her was for her not to interrupt me!

Then I went up to bed with my computer, intending to write there. But the bedtime routine sucked up all my time and by the time I settled in, I was sleepy and it was late and I needed to go to sleep if I wanted to be fresh today.

So, still working on a way to make the evening session happen. If I could just figure out how to actually get started at 7:30, that might be all I need.

Also, still not feeling the flu! I’m hopeful I skated past this one. :D