Hitting Those Daily Targets

Or: Is Wordcount Bullshit?

From ‘The Shining’. Tho’ this doesn’t really need a caption, to be fair.

In his ‘On Writing’ (which I can’t recommend enough), Stephen King says he tries for two thousand words a day, and that sometimes, he can do that in an hour, and sometimes it takes him until the evening.

We’re all familiar with this, how those words can flow like water and bring nothing but pure creative joy, or how finding every one has you bashing your head on the keyboard, and finding the one after that is like pulling out your own back teeth.

But: two thousand words. In theory, that’s amazing. You clock that every day, you rack up the big numbers very quickly, and you can get that 90k MS sorted in record time. Sounds great on paper, right.

But is it really that easy?

First problem: most of us have jobs. Contrary to what #booktok or the (cough) big retailers would have us believe, most writers don’t make much money. We do this, believe it or not, for love.

What a silly bunch we are.

Second problem: we have homes and families and responsibilities. Shit that gets in the way. If we’re lucky, we have a partner that picks up a lot of the slack, but if we’re by ourselves, the distractions are many and relentless. Houses need cleaning, jobs need sorting, errands need running, children (even big ones, and no matter how much you tell them ‘I have to work now’) get under your feet because they want the thing. Where, then, that precious writing time?

(If you haven't read my Substack on finding it, it’s here).

But your cheekily snatched time is only half the problem, because wordcounts are also about discipline. Not the discipline to sit your butt down in the chair and put your fingers on the keyboard, but the discipline to not TIDGE.

Tidging in the enemy. It’s the Thief of Time. And wordcount.

If you’re plagued by distractions anyway, the bloody last thing you want to do is constantly go back through your work, making sure it’s perfect (and it won’t be, that’s why we have editors), before you go on. And then you do go on, and something shifts, and you have to go back and later the new thing in, all over again, and so on, and so on. It’s not just procrastinating, it’s pulling your MS round yourself like some sort of literary security blanket, because OCD, and because it’s easier than forging ahead.

Since Covid, I’ve had to teach myself: STOP IT.

Read through the last thousand words to get a run up (particularly if I’ve been at work for a couple of days), and then forge ahead. Time or no, the lack of wastage is also where those big wordcounts come from. It can be difficult – when I know that something isn’t quite right I have to actively refuse to go back and sort it, I have to make myself jot down the note and carry on – but it stops you double- and treble-handling your own workload.

After all, we all already know how many times we read (and read, and bloody read) the opening of our book, before we actually get to the close.

It’s a tough lesson, and even after this many years in the business it’s been hard thing to learn. But at the end of the (writing) day, the wordcount is not just about how many words you’ve written.

It’s about how many words you keep.

Reading: Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which is the mythmaster at his finest. Do yourself a favour, take a little break, and give it a read (if you haven’t already). Have Travis Baldree’s Bookshops and Bonedust lined up next, and just planning to enjoy the happy.

Watching: Still watching TNG with Isaac and it does get better as the series go on. Picard and Data remain awesome, Worf remains - well - Worf, much prefer Polaski to Crusher, and Troi continues to be a waste of space and its final front-ears. Nothing new there, I guess, but it’s fun watching Isaac see it all for the first time.

Playing: Returning to our CyberPunk camapign today, something we pick up in odd moments. Characters are VERY low level (and scuzzy as fuck), and it’s a very, very long way from the game we played in the Nineties, from whence Ecko and Co made their way to the printed page.

But hey, new is no bad thing!