Read Write Edit Play Repeat vol. 22

Does This Newsletter Count as My Thousand Words for the Day?

Jun 08, 2022

Does This Newsletter Count as My Thousand Words for the Day?

I am not a fan of wordcounts. It’s probably the only effective way for any writer to meet a deadline, but I don’t like them. Some of it is my own brain with all its quirks. I get all up in my head about wordcounts. I get fixated upon particular numbers, how they add up, the patterns they create; and then that’s all I can think about.

Wordcounts also discourage me. One bad day, as if I only ever have one, and the rest of my week is thrown off, like I’m always trying to make up for that one non-writing day back on Tuesday or the Wednesday I fell a few hundred words short of my goal.

My compromise with wordcounts is that I do word minimums. I need to do 1000 words a day or 500 words a day on a particular piece in order to have time to edit it before I turn it in to the publisher. I try to make that daily minimum per piece as low as possible. The sooner I pass it, the sooner I’m in the flow of writing and not looking at wordcounts anymore. Often, I’ll pass it by quite a lot. The key for me is just starting to get the words down.

But then, I don’t keep track anymore. I don’t write down my total words for the day. I don’t have any idea how many total words I’ve written this week, this month, or this year. The next day I don’t remember how many words I wrote yesterday. After a while, I don’t know which days I didn’t write at all. It’s a new day and a new start and I just write again.

I guess my ultimate goal is to just write, to just create the story. I suppose on some level I’m trying to recapture that raw drive I had at the very beginning of my journey when I was just writing because there was absolutely nothing else in the world I wanted to do. I get very close to that many days because writing is magic to me even when it’s not going well.

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