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I have a friend who has been struggling with this issue. Because she has time issues related to work, she measures all her progress by how many words she writes. So when she’s in another stage of writing outside of creating, she feels like she’s not making any progress at all. Word count is a very visible goal, but in revision, editing, and even proofreading, it doesn’t work the same way. Yet, it’s real work and sometimes harder than the creation, just not terribly measurable like when you create a story.
You could always count how much you have edited to get a measurable means of progress. You could count the amount of words that have been looked at while editing/proofreading, how many pages/chapters have been edited, or go the NaNoEdMo route and count how many hours you’ve been editing for.
Time? Number of minutes actually spent?
The advantage of word count, when it applies, is you get a sense of things done, whether those words will have to be ripped asunder at some later time.
Brainstorming: word count is okay but not great–often the purpose is to have ideas, not to judge them, and for that word count is okay. It’s not wonderful if you happen to have the insight that “aha, this idea I wrote down two years ago fits here” — ten seconds of realization might
Editing: Depends on the purpose. If you’re really looking for a metric, I’d venture that editing has three main purposes: story, readability, and concision. (I’m making this up as I write, so this is something below half-baked.)
I haven’t come up with anything for story beyond “comments from readers” but you could approximate readability by something like the Flesch index: pick a level and see what the difference is. (The Flesch index might not be the best choice, but there might be a readability index that gives you part of what you’re looking for; if your readability efforts are all about making sure that the rhythm of the sentences is correct, then record every one you change, and if it’s “In the morning I took a comma out, and in the afternoon I put it back” well, that’s two changes.)
For concision you might arbitrarily say that you’re going to make the text 10% shorter. Most things can be made 10% shorter without harm, at least during the early stages–though you might be the kind of writer who needs to make things ten per cent longer, in which case you’d use that as your metric. So write down the number of words you started with, the number of words you ended with, and the percentage difference. How does it approach your goal?
Or perhaps you have made the goal that you’re going to hit every sense every 250 words. Record the number of sensory impressions you add.
Proofing…for technical material, I’ve just recorded the number of pages and the time. It varies between “Wow, mistake-laden” and “Easy-peasy!” but you can set a number of mistakes to try and find on a page. For technical documents, I generally set the number at one new mistake a page–that is, if they’ve sent me something that got munged in conversion, so “their” is always spelled “theyre”, well, I only count it as one error the first time. (Saying “new” means that I can generally set the number low after the first dozen pages. Not always.)
To an extent, these are all tricks meant to fool the brain into thinking you’ve gotten stuff done. That means they can be misused–but if you’re trying to overcome the problem of “I didn’t do anything today,” they might help.
Great at theory, terrible at practice.
This was a huge issue for me until I worked it out, since I use monitoring my progress as a means of keeping myself writing.
My solution was fairly simple: editing, proofreading, or anything else still involves reaching a certain, specific point in the story. So I simply find that spot, select the text from that point to the beginning, and use that figure (I use a spreadsheet which will automatically subtract previous work. So, say I’d edited up to 47,212 words the day before, then I reached 54,892 words – I’d just need to enter 54,892 and I’d have the result that I’d edited 7,680 words that day calculated for me.)
There are issues which can arise from this specific method. If most of the editing that day involves cutting out huge sections, and I’m not adding much to take its place, I can end up with a negative word count. I’ve considered using remaining words (those still unedited) as the basis for my calculations instead, but at the moment this way is working for me so I’m sticking with it.* But your friend might need to play around with my method. It’s an idea, a springboard to start from, not a rigid framework.
One other issue: obviously, word counts for each activity are not directly equivalent. With the same amount of time, I tend to edit more words than I can usually write in that amount of time, and proofread far more words in that time. It just takes time to learn what’s “right” for each stage – just as it took time to learn what sort of word count I could expect from myself (and I still have to adjust that sometimes, if conditions change). So I don’t think you’re going to find an instant fix for your friend, merely a system they can think about and slowly implement in a way which helps them.
* One reason this works for me is that I worry more about overall averages than daily counts. That is, if I have a “bad” day, I do know I might be running into trouble, but I don’t get too excited as long as, over time, the result looks good. If I obsess too much over a single day, I’ll tie myself in knots whenever things get difficult. Then, I’ll just give up because I can’t meet my target every single day. I do use daily counts; I just consider them as statistics that are of limited use except as considered over time. For me, that balance works out well. I don’t lose the fine detail, but a single day which is interrupted a trillion times won’t drive me to utter despair. And, of course, with editing a negative result can be just as telling as a positive one: it gives you a way to measure how much you’ve cut. The trick is to manipulate the raw statistics so they provide the information which is useful to you.
Here is a suggestion:
Decide what percentage of the story the editing is changing. 10%? 20%? This can be difficult to decide but give yourself a base number. Then, at the end of each editing phase, see how many total words there are in that section and take it times your percentage.
Or just give yourself a base number of something like 20 words per page. It works out about the same. Extensive editing of some books might be as much as 50 or 100 words per page. Don’t try to actually count each word. You’ll go crazy. Just give yourself a reasonable number and stick with it. Even if it’s not quite right, it’s not going to matter to anyone. This is for you alone.
Editing is going to mean lower word counts compared to writing new stuff, but that’s okay. Just find a system that works for you and makes you happy to see the numbers change as you go through the manuscript. Happy writers do more work.
Thanks, everyone! I’ll pass these along.
I’m thinking one of the problems is that she works in an industry where metrics are the norm and everything has to be measurable (it’s a Washington, DC thing). Projects are created to show dashboards of pie charts and bar charts to show status. They have trouble with things that can’t be measured.
I just use pages, mostly. I’ve tried more complex schemes and mostly they don’t work. Counting how many pages I worked on today also lets me account for those situations when the same section gets visted repeatedly — if I have to go through it six times on six different days, then I count it six times.
Sometimes I count it by story units — xx scenes, xx chapters, etc.
If she does use words, she should remember that it’s words processed, not words added. Sometimes when I’m editing, I forget that.
I’ve gone away from typing and I do more handwritten first draft of a scene first, then I take it and type it up. I do some editing while I’m typing. So I count the pages that I write.
Maripat
I think it’s going to be hard to find a single answer to this. Well, it’s a writing question.
First of all, it’s obvious from the replies that the details of the specific process will affect what can be counted. Then, no one but the person using the system can say what “metric” would work for them. More and more, I really don’t think there is “one answer to rule them all” in any aspect of writing. It is certainly useful to learn how others write, as it may give us ideas we can incorporate into our own process – and, occasionally, one person may find another’s method works for them.
I’m not suggesting a totally insular approach to writing. I doubt there is an author alive who couldn’t still stand to learn something. Once they’re dead, of course, they’re no longer capable of learning, so I guess we have to let them off the hook. I can’t, say, criticise Dickens because he’s no longer learning.
But learning is not the same thing as blindly doing what works for someone else. Writing is a very personal, very individual activity. And the variety of answers I see in this thread has shown me that even a “simple” topic can have multiple approaches.For what it’s worth, although I’ve developed my own method and it seems to be working for me – thus, I don’t plan on scrapping it right away – some of the replies have me wondering whether I might not be better off considering other approaches for certain works. That’s the other thing that has really opened my eyes. I’m actually discovering I may need to tweak my process for a specific work to get the best results. This is not always a matter of learning something new and improving my process in general. Sometimes, it is just that a specific project I’m working on isn’t a good fit for that process, forcing me to tweak it, then go back to “normal” on the next project.
I don’t know how many of you have found this in your own work, but I at least am learning that I can’t just settle down with one routine worked out and connect the dots. I’ve got to fiddle with it as often as not, because what worked once has a habit of not always working. Which is disconcerting, since I’m very much a creature of routine. Then again, I fear if I let myself get settled into a routine which was carved in stone, I might never recover if circumstances forced me to alter that routine. So perhaps it’s for the best. I don’t know, but it is fun learning more about how I work and learning how to get more writing done with less agony.
Sometimes, the counting drives me crazy. I’ve taken to keeping a journal with one page listing my monthly/weekly goals and the opposite side listing numbers for each day. whatever writing related activity I did that day, gets written down. “Crit”, SS Rev (short story revision), Novel, Slush, etc. If I did nothing, then I make an X.
At the end of the week, if I made my goals, or didn’t, or I blasted them out of the water is mentally noted and I adjust the next week’s goals to fit my writing time better.
The visual does so much for me.
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