The Tyranny of Numbers

One of the things I'm doing with my new novel (TimeSplash!) is setting myself a daily word-count target. It's something I haven't tried before and it is very revealing.

I actually write very slowly and part of the reason for that is that I hate editing. The very thought of NaNoWrImO (or however it's capitalised) makes me shudder. The idea of having to face 50,000 words of badly written sentences in a poorly-structured rats' nest (which is what I'd end up with) is just unthinkable. I like to plan ahead, get the whole structure in my mind, spend hours mulling over each scene before I write it and then make each sentence I write as good as I can make it as I write it. I also do a lot of detailed research while I'm writing (I have a fetish for accuracy which means I need to know lots about every little thing I casually mention in passing!) I still have to go back, read through what I've done, edit and rework, even move large chunks around - but not very much. The time I put in up front saves a lot of much more difficult and tedious work at the end. So it is difficult to decide just how many words a day I should write.

In the end, I decided that a thousand words a day should be doable. This would give me a first draft in roughly a hundred days and, with editing and re-work, a finished draft in, say, 150 days - about half a year per book. So I set myself the target and I've been monitoring myself ever since. I have records of my productivity for 49 days now and it's interesting.

First thing to notice is that my running average is well below the 1,000 word target. In fact, it is 704 words/day. I only have 33,000-odd words written instead of the 50,000 I should have by now. I tell myself that the first half of the book requires more research and more thinking about than the second half but I'm not entirely convinced.

The second thing is that my output is incredibly variable. There are days - sometimes runs of several days, when I write nothing at all. There are others - sadly, no runs - where I do 2,500 words. (My output looks more bi-polar than normally distributed but, for what it's worth, the standard deviation on that 704 average is a whopping 646.)

The third interesting thing is the way the forecast changes over time. The forecast is the number of words I will have written in a hundred days based on how many I've written so far and how many more I'm going to write if I keep up the same average output. This figure fell steadily from the initial 100,000 until it hit about 85,000 fifteen days ago. Since then, it has bumped along at the same level. This means my average output appears to have increased when my forecast output reached some kind of threshold level. What this tells me is that my earlier, lower average was just laziness. When I'm faced with the stark reality of not having enough words at the end of the project for a decent-sized book, I am clearly able to push myself a little harder.

Sadly, the fourth (and last) interesting statistic is my running calculation of how many words a day I will have to write now and for the remaining 52 days, to finish on target for my initial plan. It currently stands at 2,200 words/day. Given my current struggles to produce 1,000, 2,000+ looks impossible.

So the book might overrun a little.

Of course, the book will be as long as it needs to be. This 1,000 words/day for 100 days target is purely arbitrary, based on a rough guess (a gut feel) as to how long this particular book will end up being. Perhaps it really is an 85,000-word book and I'm bang on target! I won't really know until I'm farther along - it's not something I'm good at estimating yet.

On the other hand, maybe 2,200 words/day isn't impossible if I just stop writing blog postings, answering emails, chipping in on news groups, and reading all those blogs in my feed reader.