Writing a Book is an Exercise in Faith
I have a complicated relationship with word counts.
This morning I spent forty minutes fidgeting in my chair before I laid down a single word. The urge to get up and do anything else was incredibly strong. What as the point, I wondered? I wasn’t feeling it. I was wasting my time. I had only a short window left to write before I had to start my day job, so I wasn’t going to make any meaningful progress anyway. The only thing that stopped me was that I reminded myself that books get written word by word, line by line, even — maybe especially — when we don’t want to. And if I gave up on this session today, it would make giving up tomorrow that much easier.
I don’t have a perfect writing practice, but I am someone who shows up. So I showed up. I glued my butt to the chair, and an hour and a half later I managed to eke out 400 words.
That progress was hard-won, and I spent the rest of the morning beating myself up because it didn’t feel like much.
But it was something. And all those little somethings add up.
Having Faith Is Hard
Making progress on a long-form project is an exercise in faith. Faith that an entire book can be written in twenty-minute increments between work meetings and doctor’s appointments. Faith that I can create a cohesive story, 400 words at a time. Faith that I don’t need to touch the project every single day to know that it will be finished. Faith that if I need to step away to refill my creative well, I will come back.
It was even harder to have that faith when I was writing my first novel, and I had no evidence to base myself on except other writers telling me it was possible. Now, on my second book, I can at least remind myself that I have managed this colossal undertaking once before, so in theory I should be able to do it again.
Sometimes that helps.
What also helps is not being too serious about tracking my daily progress. I know a lot of writers keep spreadsheets of their daily word counts, and I’m glad that works for them. If I look at my word count too often, it feels like I will never get to the end, especially on the days when the words aren’t flowing. I will do it for the odd writing challenge — I still think they’re fun if I keep my goals low — and I will hype myself up if I hit a particularly impressive number (every 10k I add to my manuscript, I like to celebrate). But setting large goals, like “I’m going to write 50k in a month” is a guaranteed way to get me to self-sabotage. I tried writing 1,600 words a day for NaNoWriMo exactly once, and I nearly had a breakdown.
Sticking to strict performance metrics does not work for me. There is nothing consistent about how much I write in a given day, or even week. This week I wrote over 2,000 words in one day, and only 200 in another. Some weeks I barely write at all.
If I aimed for 2,000 every day I’d burn out. If I only let myself write 200 when I felt I had the time and energy for more, I’d feel empty. So when I sit down to write, I never set out to meet any particular word count goals. I just set out to write.
Giving Myself Permission Not to Count
As a rule, I don’t look at my word count while I’m actively writing. I like the dopamine hit of checking it at the end of a session, but if I can see those numbers while I write, I start to obsess over making the number larger, rather than setting down my thoughts using however many words it takes. I can’t sink into flow, because I’m too busy obsessing over adding just ten more words, just fifteen, just twenty. I lose focus to wondering if I’m moving too slowly, wondering if I’m not doing enough.
It’s for the same reason that I don’t use a timer on my treadmill — I just go until my podcast ends or my back starts to hurt — and I don’t own a scale. As soon as I start measuring my weight, I get down on myself for where I am, and I feel like no matter what progress I make, it’s never enough. My midwife never weighed me — not once — while I was pregnant. She said there were better ways than a number to gauge growth, and she found a lot of pregnant mothers put inordinate amounts of stress on themselves checking their weight gain too often. To this day, when friends discuss how much weight they gained in pregnancy, I have to say I have no idea. But I got a healthy baby out of the process, so I guess things turned out fine.
Now, I’m trying to remind myself that there are better ways than forcing myself to meet a consistent word count to measure progress, too. I will get a finished book out of this ritual of showing up. The day-to-day change in word count doesn’t matter.