Let’s Talk Process: Judging Progress
This is dangerous ground, kids. Because when we get judge-y, even about ourselves, we forget why we’re doing this writing thing. We stop loving it. Whether writing is your full time job, your part time job, your hobby, etc, to actually make it through to the end of a project, you have to love the writing. You will put blood into it, have no doubt. I, personally, don’t put blood into something I don’t love. I don’t bleed for cheeseburgers. I like them a lot, but I wouldn’t trade my hand for one.
I would sacrifice body parts to make my writing a reality.
That said, a writer does need measurable goals.
If your goal is “finish the book,” there’s a fair chance you don’t ever get there. Writing a book takes for-freakin’ ever if your’e doing it right. Not the first draft; there are people who can knock those out in a few days. Writing a book is a conception to birth process, blank screen to order button or box-full on your porch or publication of a mag. The first royalty check, the additional earnings statement, those are milestones sure, and very important ones. I’m such a dork I posted pics of mine on Twitter (go ahead, you can look, the evidence is still there). I’m not sure, however, one can judge her progress by them.
In reality, payment is incidental to the writing process, as much as we all love it, want it, pray for it. The writing, the rewriting, the editing, the reediting, the Beta reading, the Beta revising. The “is it done debate,” both internal and external. The submission. The post submission freak out. The waiting. More waiting. More waiting. The rejection. The acceptance.
Those are the milestones that matter.
It can take years. Decades. A lifetime.
Which means one needs small, measurable goals so as not to lose one’s mind. To save one’s self from the doubt trolls, the self loathing gnomes. The “oh shit what am I doing frogs.” Yes, frogs, deal with it.
The important thing in my tiny, sieve-y, Swiss cheesy mind is to mark progress rather than completion. Set goals, but if you don’t hit them, spending a bunch of time berating yourself is wasting hours (minutes, days, weeks) you could be using to make additional progress. All of that cat-o-nine-tails is going to do is leave scars. Easier said than done, I know, and I have been, and will be again, guilty of self-flagellation. I’m getting better in that I spend less time on it now and can usually knock myself out of it with a prodigious mental slap, really good shumai, and bubble tea. Peach please, with lychee jelly also? Thanks.
i measure progress in a couple of different ways. Ways that seem to best tame that savage bitch of an internal editor. I’m waiting on my permit to hunt her down, but it’s taking fucking forever.
Some sort of percentage chart: For once the widget was posted and she was beholden to it. Until she changed it because she needed to stretch a deadline. A graphic representation of progress is helpful because it’s something you can understand without having to do actual math. Which is nice. I’m a writer Jim, not a… Bar graphs are pretty colors and the longer that thing gets, the better you feel. When it hits the end, you do a happy dance and sleep for a week. There’s no counting, no timing, just you and a bar. Or a pie chart. Whatever shape you like best. Me? I like frogs. Wait, what? Where are all these frogs coming from?
Page count : More of an editing tool than a writing one. In the initial creation of a work, page count doesn’t mean all that much because maybe your forgot to double space or accidentally put in a space and a half. Maybe you have section breaks and chapter breaks and whatever other kind of breaks you happen to dig. You don’t edit every word of a draft (say it with me kids: “that’s a rewrite”) and thus, you need a more wide ranging marker of progress. If I find myself only finishing 1-2 pages per hour, I start to consider myself in rewrite territory and may need to take a break to figure out exactly the hell is going.
Word Count: In the more active stages of writing, I measure my progress by word count. Because… I don’t know why. Because in creating something new on a screen or a blank piece of paper, it’s hard to think about something as huge as a page, let alone a chapter or a section or a book. Pages hold a lot of words. When I first started writing, I would get angry at myself if I didn’t finish several thousand words in an hour. That was silly. Who the hell is going to pound out 3000 words an hour? Even if your hands can move that fast and you have had a lot of coffee. Right, that’s what I thought. Currently, on sprinting nights, I try to hit a 3000 total over the course of 80 minutes of sprinting time. This seemed reasonable once i had done several nights in a row of sprinting and had finished somewhere around 3000 words total on most of those nights. The nights I go a little over make up for the nights I’m under. And if they didn’t, it would be okay. It would not kill me. Not hitting a goal isn’t the end of all things unless you make it the end of all things, in which case, let’s review: trolls, gnomes, frogs.
Mind you, I wan’t always this reasonable. I used to gauge myself by sections and chapters and beat the crap out of myself when I fell asleep with my face in the keyboard at 0200. Now that I’ve adapted the first draft “don’t think, just write style,” I’ve become a far more reasonable writer. And human being.
Time: Sometimes, i have to go to work. Or go to bed. Others, I feel like watching TB or reading a book or, occasionally, staring at the wall. Or taking a shower (anyone else have really good ideas in the shower? Hey, my words are up here, buddy!). So I set a time limit. The only goal is to stay focused for a certain number of minutes. Some days, I’m fast. Others I’m slow. Somedays I have to stop and think. Others I just write. As long as I fill the time with a writing related activity, I’m happy. This is best for short runs or runs that may be interrupted. Whatever you finish, you finish and you decide to be happy with it.
A relatively new concept for yours truly.
It’s a process…
That’s how I do it, baby. How about you?
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