Are word count-related writing goals cramping your writing process?
Effective and enjoyable writing strategies beyond 1000 words a day
Hello and Happy Wednesday.
It’s March! The days are lengthening, spring is sorta kinda trying to spring. Is there hope around the bend? Maybe!
Things certainly felt warm and fuzzy and hopeful in our Time Management class last week.1 Thanks to all who joined! One question that came up during class in different iterations was:
“I’ve identified time each week to write in, but I don’t know what to write during my writing time.”
and/or
“I feel so good and confident when I’m doing writing-adjacent things like research and reading, but when I actually go to write, I don’t know where I’m going and I feel like a failure.”
In my search for a good answer and solution to these questions, I started thinking about the 1000-words-a-day practice that many people use as a daily writing routine.
Daily word count goals can help build accountability and muscle memory and keep you connected to your project in an essential way. And while I would never call any kind of writing practice ineffective, I do think it’s important to interrogate what your overarching goal is if you’re using word count goals to meet it.
To my mind, word count goals are super beneficial in two different scenarios:
You know exactly where you are going in terms of plot and character building and you’re trying to hit the marks that you’ve already established to complete the story’s arc.
You don’t know where you’re going and you’re still experimenting with plot, with voice, with everything, and you are writing 1000 words a day to help you find your path.
Put another way: in the first scenario, you know where you are going and you are on the road to get there, it’s just a question of walking a certain distance every day, while in the second scenario, you are dancing naked under the moon in the middle of the woods, and you’re okay with that.
The scenarios in which I think the 1000 words a day routine can do more harm than help is when you’re unsure of where you are going but are pressuring yourself to get there no matter what. You’ve decided that a novel is 80,000 words and doggone it you are going to reach that word count by the end of summer, or you’ve read that memoirs need to be at least 60,000-words and you’re at 20,000 words so you “have” to keep on going, or basically, any mindset that has you prioritizing quantity over quality.
If you have a goal to traditionally publish what you’re working on, sometimes spending the time you’d usually allocate to meeting word counts would be better spent making sure you know where you’re going with your project: working on outlines or storyboards, plotting out first, second and third acts and their accompanying plot points, filling out character arc worksheets, charting character motivations, making sure our memoirs have some commercial appeal by writing query letters and pitch statements, exercises of this ilk.
Here are some new ways to think about goal setting (and goal meeting) during your writing time beyond hitting word counts, all of which will help you prioritize the quality of what you are writing instead of how much you write.