As a counterpoint to my earlier post on low word count days, let me take a moment to discuss high word count days. And specifically, in the context of yesterday’s writing, where I managed to blow away my previous one-day record of 5,300 words by writing nearly 7,200 words. If you are not a writer, 7,200 words might not mean much so let me put it into perspective: it’s about 30 double-spaces pages.
Most full time writers I know consider 2,000 words a full day’s work. Since I am not a full time writer, I consider 2,000 words or better a high word count day. How many of these high word count days have I had in the last 728 days? 26 of them, making them twice as rare as a low word count day. Here are all of my high word count days laid out over time:
Put another way: I have a low word count day (less than 250 words) about once every 13 days. I have a high word count day (2,000 words or more) about once every 28 days. I think this makes sense. Given limited time, it’s easier to squeeze in less than a page, then it is to find the time to write ten pages.
I took the low word count days and high word count days and mashed them together, and here is what I got (low = red, high = blue):
All the white space in between are days on which I wrote at least 250 words, but less than 2,000 words.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of this exercise is to find that a high word count day does not necessarily follow a low word count day. This might be true if I were trying to make quota, but since my only real goal is to write every day, I don’t feel the need to “make up the difference” after a low word count day.
Yesterday’s record was an oddity all around. I had written about 3,000 words of a first draft of a story, and yesterday, the rest of the story just kind of clicked. I wrote the remain 3,000 words almost without stopping. As I have explained before, my first drafts are for me–me telling myself the story. My second drafts are complete rewrites. Now that I know the story, I can tell it to an audience, adding all kinds of nice embellishments. But it means that I rewrite the whole thing. So I started the second draft yesterday as well, and managed to get through about 4,000 words of it before calling it quits. Thus,a 7,200-word day.
Interestingly, the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. Writing does not tire me out the way that, say, spending 8 hours writing code does. I get mentally drained from coding, but I seem to derive an endless supply of energy from writing. Whether or not the writing is good… well, I guess my beta-readers will let me know.
In any case, I suspect it will be a very long time before I have another 7,000 word day.
RSS - Posts