Word count is one of the best metrics for writing productivity. It’s easily tracked, translates across stories, genres, and formats, and is largely style agnostic. Plus, since it is the favored metric of the publishing industry, it has applicability beyond personal projects, and can serve as a common language for writers to discuss their stories with each other. Especially over the long term, I find it provides helpful insights into my writing habits and the structure of my stories. On shorter time scales, though, it doesn’t always reflect the amount of writing work I might be doing.
This became evident to me recently when I was working on Impressions, and on setting up my writing tracker for 2024. Last year, when I began working on Impressions, a chapter might take just a few days to write, while recent chapters have been taking much longer. In part, this is because I’ve had less writing time, but that alone does not explain the change; I know that in a writing session of a given length I am not producing the same volume of output as I was at the beginning of the work. This is not because of diminished enthusiasm, writer’s block, or being bogged down in the middle. Instead, it is because of the increasing complexity of the writing task.
Writing that actually occurs at a keyboard is more like translation, the textualization of the story that I create in my head (I wrote about this at length in “Trail to Keyboard“). Most of the time, I go into a writing session having already imagined the part of the story that I want to write, and the clearer that visualization is, the faster the writing goes. This is how I can sometimes crank out a five-thousand-word story in just an hour or two. I do the same thing for scenes and chapters of longer works, but the difference is that the visualizations become less clear. Not because my vision of the story is less resolved, but because the story becomes, past a certain point, too large to hold all of the details simultaneously in my head without referencing my notes.
Think of it like the memorization problem we’ve discussed before with regards to learning. Yes, notes, computers, the internet, books, and other media mean that we can always look up facts and information, and thus we don’t need to worry about memorization…except that only when we have that information top of mind can we effectively apply that information in the moment, synthesize it to come up with new ideas and innovations. When I’m imagining what happens next in a writing project stretching over many months and a hundred thousand words, the result may not align with what I’ve already written. Then, when I sit down to write that scene or that chapter, I have to spend time referencing the scene against my notes, against earlier parts of the story, and then revising it as I write it so that it fits. That slows down the writing significantly, both because of the time taken to actually check these things, and because of the additional creativity involved.
My writing goes fastest when I already know what I want to write and just need to put it into words. That’s why a longer writing session is not always helpful; if it exceeds the amount of story that I pre-imagined, the number of additional words drops dramatically as I have to imagine the next sequence while I’m writing it. When I was working on a sequel to Fo’Fonas, my first completed novel, I had to put the project aside because I hadn’t made sufficiently organized notes and was spending all of my time reading back through the first novel in order to make sure what I was writing for the sequel would align. I’ve been far more organized with Impressions, and Impressions is a shorter work, but I’ve still learned some tips for the next project to make my life easier with regards to notetaking.
All of which is to say that if you’re looking at my writing progress on Impressions, and wondering how I wrote the first ten chapters in the time it might take me to write the last three, this is why. I’ve been aware of it before, but not brought significant introspection to the matter until now. It’s something that I’ll need to take into account in future projects. I’ll conclude with a rare question to the writing community: do you encounter this phenomenon in your projects, and if so, how do you account for it or attempt to mitigate it?
IGC Publishing 