Daily Word Count - does the world have to know

[MontiLee]

Anyone that run in the circles of writers encounters this phenomenon - the regular posting of the output of one's mental musings to pixels or pen.

A lot writers to which I'm connected on Twitter do it and I'm, of two minds of it.

First - does it matter and second - who cares?

Writers have always had to justify what they do, and by the same extension prove it externally to others. It's one of those things that's about as meaningless as posting one's caloric intake if you're on a diet or how many sex partners you've had over the course of a weekend.

We do it in coffeeshopes, in libraries, in the park. We look serious hunched over our laptops ot fancy paper notebook and we try to look Writerly. We are creating worlds and if no one see us doing it, it must not be getting done.

Should we decide to secret ourselves away in offices or bedroom, or catch a few words over our lunch break, we feel the ened to announce how many words we squeezed in as if to say, yesh I have a day job or other responsibilities but I AM STILL WRITING. If Stephen King had a blog in the late 70's - would he have posted a word count while writing Carrie?

Does posting a word count really make a potential reader think, "whoa, he writes a lot. He must be someone worth reading."

Daily Word Count only matters during NaNo - when daily output it crucial if you want to win. One has to average 1,667 words a day to complete 50,000 in 30. Should you "win" and by win I mean evacuate 50,000 words worth of mental deitrus, no one (except maybe the greenest of writers) expects you to have anything you can send off to a printer for publication. Yes, we've seen it done, and it's amusing to read how "horrible" publishers are when those little gems are rejected. Maybe 10% of what I write during NaNo is usable because it's the word count I'm aiming towards. Sure the plot and characters are important as well, but really when I crack 1,670 I can celebrate.

As writing and publishing become more accessible, and by accessible I mean easily researchable, the mystic of the process id broken down (not that there's any real mystery) and somewhere along the long, some writers seem to have forgotten that it's the final product that's most important. Ading up the word count of some of the more prolific twitter denizens, they should have a few novels and several dozen short stories - and maybe they do, but that final validation comes from a sale or a publication.

When I catch a few hours and write a few grand worth of words, I don't for a moment believe that all of them are going into survive Tribal Council. My process of writing it to get out the idea, and over time and several edits the story becomes more concrete and tangible. How many words I put out in a session is inconsequential.

So here's my point - and I do have one:

We're writers and we birth characters who go on to have exciting (and sometimes very brief lives). The very fact that we call ourselves "writers" or "authors" is self-validating. Whether we're just starting out or have been at it a while, we know what we're doing and if we have the proper discipline mindset, it becomes apparent in our credits and sales.

So now that I've ranted, here are my questions for you:

How important is it for you to let people know your writing output?

Does seeing another writer's output make you feel bad about not writing or not writing more?

Have you ever seen another writer's output and thought they were really full of crap?

[peggychristie]

Personally, it's no one's business how much I do or don't write each day. If I had an agent or permanent home at a publishing house, ok. It would be there business. But otherwise I'll keep it to myself. Every now and again I'll have a really productive day and will share that on twitter or in a text to my hubby/friends.

But really - doesn't anyone actually care? And if you do, why??

[micah]

First of all, let me congratulate you on your 100th post on these forums. Milestone achieved.

I have actually done this. For a few years I used daily, the semi-regular word count posts to spur myself on. This was pre-Twitter, so it happened on my website. I knew that the majority of the people who came to read the rants in my blog would not be interested, so I started a second blog page with cool metrics and descriptions (an idea blatantly stoled from another writer's website).

My goal had been to write a certain number of words each day, five days a week. I had a spreadsheet marking my progress and everything. The problem, I soon realized, was that time spent on the blog or with the numbers was time that I could have spent writing. My attempt to goad myself into writing more was actually taking time away from writing.

That said, I still maintain the second blog. I just don't worry about posting on it every day. It has become a place to discuss publications, things I've read, and yes, occasionally the self-congratulatory "look what I did!"

Other people's posts don't really bother me. The people who I follow who do this are, I think, not trying to validate themselves as writers but to share their mini-successes. At least that's the way I try to look at it. If they start to bug me, I just skip those posts.

[MontiLee]

It's a curiosity because there's isn't anyone anywhere keeping tally. It's not as if when I go to submit a ms, a publisher will haul out my Permanent Record and cluck over how I wasn't prolific enough in my down time. "Ma'am, you wrote 1,400 words over a lunch break on the17 of May and then didn't write but 400 on the 6 of June. Were you in jail or something?"

I used to keep a running count in the sidebars of my blogs because I would get more than a few queries on when specific works would be complete. Then it really hit me -

Readers aren't our bosses. In the greater scheme of things, readers are clients of publishers and we're sub-contractors paid upon completion. I have no schedule or time frame and my works in progress are just that. They're done when the story's done. No amount of picking will make me write faster or more, un;less the reader wants the kind of thing I crap out at NaNo.

I do work best on deadlines but those aren't tied into word counts (unless the story has a specific word count in mind). I suppose when I sit down to write, which is no longer every day, I don't set an artificial ceiling for when I stop. I stop when the words stop. If I've only written 300 words I'm not going to berate myself for a low number because it's 300 more words than I had when I sat down.

I think that's it as well - posted word counts, especially several over many hours creates that "Prolific Author" vibe, as if to convey that the brain is so full of words, if the author doesn't get them all out, they'll explode like a gray matte bomb with grammar shrapnel.

I have another question for another thread.

[micah]

I meant to mention this earlier, but it slipped my mind. I will admit to being spurred on by the occasional "I did this" post/tweet/blog/smoke signal. There are days when I know that I should be writing but keep coming up with reasons not to. If I'm checking Twitter for the hundredth time and see "Just wrote 1273 words on my lunch break" it will poke the guilt voice in the back of my brain. I don't know the person who wrote the 1273 words. For all I know they could be 1273 really crappy words. Still, it will be enough to spur the nag that lives in the back of my skull.

"That guy spent his lunch break writing. What have you done today, writer man?"

However, I fully acknowledge that this may be less a function of the post/tweet/blog/whatever and more a manifestation of my own individual psychoses.

[awgifford]

Word count today: 0
Word count yesterday: 0
There, now I feel better.