Seasons of Words: Measure Your Writing in… Love?

After an unfortunate screen-shattering incident around American Thanksgiving last year, I got a new phone. On Cyber Monday, I splurged on HabitBull, a habit tracker. I use the app to record my progress in habits I’d like to improve or just have a record of, like eating enough fruits and veggies, getting to bed on time, and, of course, daily writing.

HabitBull offers you the choice of entering a number each day (e.g. how many glasses of wine did I drink today?) or toggling a yes/no switch (e.g. did I drink any wine today?). So far, I’ve set writing to yes/no, but I’m puzzling over what criterion to use as a trigger.

See, for the past school term, I’ve been pushing myself to write 250 words a day between grading papers and answering emails. Then, the week I got HabitBull, I hit a wall. So I stopped pressing forward in word count and instead let myself outline to figure out where I went wrong.

On one hand, checking off my writing habit felt like cheating: I hadn’t written those 250 words. On the other, I was doing important writing/revision work. So shouldn’t that count?

I waver back and forth on the writing goals I set myself. Sometimes, I tell myself I’ll write for a specific length of time: 3 hours when I was in undergrad, 30 minutes for some of grad school, 15 minutes each weekday on this blog for years now.

Other times, I define my progress in word count. 250 words a day recently, a page a day during high school and undergrad, 1000 words a day on my dissertation.

Let’s face it: neither approach is guaranteed to work all the time for everyone, and even if it does work, there’s no guarantee that I’m going to produce a) a finished product b) worth reading at the end of it.

But writing advice books and blogs and events like NaNoWriMo often encourage writers to strive for either a certain amount of “butt in chair” or “words on page.” And although that kind of advice can come from an unthinking place of privilege (you’ve got to have time, health, and resources to be able afford even five minutes a day), it can sometimes be useful. So here’s how I figure progress by time and progress by length measure up for me.

Time:

Pro:

– I know how much time to set aside in my schedule each day.
This is a big one for me, because scheduling is my monomania. It’s nice to see a twenty-minute window and think, “Perfect! I can be done blogging by then and still finish my grading by nine o’clock.”
– If I’m not feeling it, I can still complete my goals.
Some days, the words run dry. If I really need to, I can sit in front of the screen or notebook and do my best. Bonus: I very seldom end up doing nothing, because at some point during even five minutes of writing time, I come up with something to do. It beats being bored, and scheduled thinking-about-writing-time sure does help with writer’s block, even if it starts off tedious.
– It forces me to rev up my creativity.
Nothing to write today? Weeeeelll, if the alternative is enforced boredom or re-treading the same writing thoughts I’ve been over a dozen times, I’ll find something to write. This blog post, for example.
– The difficulty self-adjusts to how I’m feeling that day.
If I’m having a bad day, and writing a few words at a time is all I can manage, or a worse day, when sitting quietly with my eyes open is about the best I can hope for, I can still manage my writing time. I might not get as much done as on a good day, but at least I can keep up.

Con:

– Sitting there in front of the computer waiting for the clock to tick down doesn’t help me accomplish anything.
It’s difficult to tell the difference between a bad day and a lazy day sometimes. If my brain runs dry in the last 20% of time, I often just waste it clock-watching.
– I need a block of uninterrupted time.
A lot of my “free” time is actually time nestled in between or during other non-taxing commitments. In high school and undergrad, I did a lot of my writing in the back of calculus, chemistry, Latin, or other classes where my learning style was primarily visual i.e. I’d read the textbook. Likewise, these days, my free time is in my lunch break between office hours or during meetings that mostly don’t involve me. Can’t exactly set up a timer and give writing my undivided attention.
– It discourages me from working outside my set hours.
Because then I have nothing to do for tomorrow. I’m doing a solid for Future Sarah, giving her at least the amount of work she needs tomorrow to avoid boredom.
– Work output is variable and difficult to predict.
Some tasks, like writing my dissertation or hacking together a blog entry, aren’t just about my personal progress. I also have to produce material according to an external deadline. Three hours of staring at my computer screen didn’t matter to my thesis committee; what they wanted was a draft.
– Sometimes my physical issues make it difficult to sustain work for extended periods.
I need to wear a hockey elbow pad when writing at my computer. That’s not a joke; it’s the product of long-term nerve damage in my right arm. Sometimes, forcing myself to sit at a computer or hold a pen for too long seriously hurts.

Words:

Pro:

– It’s a universal standard.
As someone who assigns a lot of writing exercises, I can tell you: your six-page essay might be wildly different in scope from your neighbour’s six-page essay, but if I tell you both to write 1500 words, you’ll hand in roughly equivalent assignments. My 250 words today is the same as my 250 words tomorrow is the same as an editor’s 250 words.
– I can work on it a bit at a time.
If I have to, I can scrape together 250 or 500 or 1000 words in the scraps of time I have leftover from other commitments. I don’t need a long stretch of freedom to get started.
– I can push myself to do it faster or slower.
I don’t have to block off a chunk of my schedule; I can whiz through my personal goal on days when the words are flowing, and on days when I’m not doing so great, I can take it nice and easy.
– It keeps me actually writing past tough parts.
Like I wrote about several weeks ago, sometimes I have to write trash to get to writing I’m happy with. Giving myself a word-count goal each day is a great way to power through writer’s block and keep my momentum going.

Con:

– It makes me obsessed over word count (which sometimes leads to bad writing).
As I mentioned above, I do assign and grade a lot of writing assignments, and I have seen every trick in the book to reach desired word count. None of it works (except, like, actually doing the right amount of research/writing/work). Sometimes, when I’m stretched, I do the same thing: just keep rambling until I hit my target for today. That doesn’t help me put content together.
– It doesn’t help me revise.
Revision is a key part of the writing process. However, it has a tendency to reduce word count. Am I discouraging myself from re-phrasing that terrible thing I just wrote because I know it means I’ll have to write even more new stuff today to “make up for it”? Sometimes. That’s not good.
– It encourages me to keep writing crap when I’m stuck instead of backtracking or letting my thoughts stew.
I also mentioned several weeks ago that sometimes I just need to wait or think it over. Getting antsy when I fail my habit tracker day after day after day doesn’t help me think.
– It’s easy to get competitive or negative over quantity instead of quality.
Hearing that someone else wrote 1000 or 2000 words a day instead of my meagre 250 makes me feel like a writing failure. It’s easy to lose track of what I’m actually trying to accomplish and want to “win” by putting words, any words, no matter how terrible, on the page. Which is silly.

Writing is not a competition to spew out as many words as possible. It’s a process, an art, a craft, a means of self-expression. Sure, we may sometimes vie with other writers over space on an agent’s or publisher’s list, sales, or readers’ attention, but it isn’t a zero-sum game, and winning isn’t the goal. A writer’s contribution can’t be captured by stats alone.

Which is why, ultimately, I have to set my writing habits based on what works for me and the manuscript. HabitBull is a tool, not a taskmaster, and I’ve got to remember that.

3 Replies to “Seasons of Words: Measure Your Writing in… Love?”

  1. How do you like HabitBull so far? I’m trying out the free version first before purchasing it – I mean, I have Google Play Store credit, but I don’t want to waste it if it’s not for me. So far, it seems pretty basic – is that just because I’m not using the premium version?

    1. I dunno — it’s very similar to the other habit tracker I’ve tried. I like the interface, though. I guess it depends on personal taste.

      BUT HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW X FILES?????

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