It's time for another edition of how many words can Chuck write in a month? That's right January is over, and it's time to update my total words written and the number of words I wrote in January. I've been looking forward to writing this post for a couple of weeks now. I like to do things where I can track progress and then I like to show improvement. Updates like this make me believe I can write a book, make that three books, this year.
I have to admit I struggled a bit more in January than it did in December. Some mornings it was harder to get my word counts, and there were some days where I didn't even write in the morning and had to make it up later in the day. There were some days where it was a slog, and I just wasn't motivated to work on the story I was supposed to. I worked on a couple other small projects, blog posts, and prewriting for my novel. But because of the discipline, I developed in December, I was able to write plenty in January, and make a lot of progress on all of those things.
So without further ado here are my word counts for January 2017. In January I was able to write 28,153 words. That is 12,620 more words than I wrote in December. I averaged 880 words per day. My goal of 548 words per day was designed to keep me on track to break 200,000 words this year. If I can keep posting monthly word counts like this one, I should write over 330,000 words in 2017. But I'm not sure that I can keep this pace up.
I have just raised the bar for myself, setting a new goal of breaking my best month of writing and setting my sights on 28,200 words. Or maybe even 30,000 words. As luck would have it, my 31 days of writing in January is followed by the shortest month of the year, February. With only 28 days in February, I really need to up my daily word count to have a chance of setting a new, monthly high score. To break 30,000 words in February, I would need to write 1,072 words a day. It’s doable but much higher than my daily goal of 548 words.
Speaking of daily goals, I set a new daily high score in January on the 8th. My record for words written in a single day is now 2,912. That Sunday happened to be a calm morning where I had a few hours to myself before church, and I was in the zone, detailing the background for my book finishing my prewriting. I only missed my daily goal of 548 words 4 times in January, for a much better completion percentage of 87.1%. Compared to December’s 22.6% that is a big improvement.
In addition to writing 28,153 words in January, I also edited 17,949 words. I'm having a little trouble balancing writing new words each day and editing the words that I have written. It has become clear to me that nothing I write is worthy of being published after the first draft. I need at least one solid edit and some rewrites to get something to a level I'm comfortable with sending to an editor. The same goes for these blog posts, I write them, but then I let them sit for a day (usually) then I read them again, edit them and rewrite portions of them. I saw one of my author friends post a motivational quote on Facebook that rewriting is writing. That statement holds true for me.
I believe I said this before in a previous post, but my goal is to write three first drafts and to publish one of them this year. I need to have new words to keep chipping away at that larger goal of three manuscripts. I also need to edit the words I have written, so that one of the manuscripts may be publishable at the end of the year. Like I said it is a balance. I feel like I could have written more this month, but at the end of the month, I started writing for half the time and editing for the other half of the time. I think this is a better process for me because last month I only edited 6,443 words. So just like my writing is a little bit each day I feel I need to make my editing a little bit each day as well so it is not such a daunting task.
Here is a graph showing might December words written versus my January. I started off strong in January but barely coasted into the finish line by the end of the month, usually just writing my minimum daily words. Part of this was a lack of direction, prewriting and outlining for my novel. I believe I have addressed those issues and I can continue to plow forward with the novel. The other part of that is the editing I discussed above, and I need to be editing as I go so that I can continue to do new words as well. I also hope that as I continue to learn how to edit my work, it will keep me from making as many mistakes in the days ahead. This approach should lead to less editing in the future as I learn from my mistakes. But this is just a theory, and I will let you know how it went in a future blog post.
So in total, I have written around 43,686 words since this journey began 62 days ago. I have one 12,000-word short story that I'm not super proud of, that I'm still editing, and will probably never publish. However, I learned a lot from that process: about plotting, character arcs, and wrapping up a story. I also have over 10,000 words done on the first draft of my novel, and another 10,000 words of prewriting for that same novel. I have a handful of blog posts and a few ideas for future stories. Those were all things I did not have at Thanksgiving last year. So as I press on in my journey to write, I would like to encourage you to reach your goals as well. Even if they seem daunting, just take them one step at a time, and in a few months, you could be much closer to reaching your goals. Cheers!
