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If you’re wondering why I’m doing a lot of “better writer” posts, it’s because I landed in The 2023 Novel Writing Tools Bundle. This is only available for three weeks, so check out the amazing selection.

National Novel Writing Month is coming up. That’s where you try to write 50,000 words in a month. If you do the math, that’s 1,667 words a day.

I’ve never taken part in Nano. I tried writing a novel in a month, using a book guide that turned out to be written by a non-fiction writer, not a novelist. The act of trying to keep up with the pace caused poor decision-making in the writing. I pushed forward, rather than cycling and (though I didn’t know I need it then) doing Thinking time. As I got near the end, I realized I was writing to get word Count, not writing because the story was engaging me.

So I called it done. And it was a big mess because of how I wrote it.

I’m a firm believer in not writing sloppily. It wastes so much time. In fact, it’s one of those things that looks like you save time. Then you discover all the problems it caused, and the layers and layers of problems caused by the fixes. Not pretty.

But everyone talks about tracking word count as a sign of progress.

Today, I was headed into the home stretch on a story for the familiars anthology. I realized I needed some breed details—the story is done from a dog’s POV. She’s not going to identify the three animals involved by breeds like humans would. The breeds are Jack Russell Terrier, Golden Retriever, and Siamese. So I need to add characteristics that people in the know would, well, know.

So I was off to research each of the breeds to find details I could use for those in the know. JRTs are very territorial; Golden Retrievers carry about a lot of toys; Siamese are supervisors.

But there’s no word count in research.

Not is there word count for thinking about the story.

Or if you revise it, do copy edits, proofread.

Or cycling the story. This one drove me crazy when I was attempting to track word count. Sometimes my cycling would cause me to lose word count, and I ended up with a negative number in Scrivener for Windows. Demoralizing! Especially when I had done a lot of work.

All of those have elements of creativity to them. When I run ProWritingAid on my story, I look for initial pronouns and work to reduce them when I write in first person. That means rephrasing sentences, and thinking about how I can word it differently. It’s writing, but I may add one or two or five words, while changing an entire sentence.

Over the years, I have tried tracking word count, because that’s what everyone talks about. Always…. always a few months later, I discover the forgotten spreadsheet with maybe six entries in it. Nothing helped. Not writing in a planner or on a calendar like Joanna Penn did (I know she says it works. No, not for me). Not getting a spreadsheet with beautiful graphics.

In my case, it’s a problem associated with two of my CliftonStrengths. The first is Focus, which is the strength where you create goals and follow them. On my list of 34 strengths, Focus ranks at #23. The second is Adaptability, which I’ll call the “Semper Gumby” strength (always flexible). It’s #4. Or, to put it simply: Focus is not a “we’ll figure out as we go along” strength; Adaptability is. Opposites.

Yet, tracking word count is presented—much like most writing advice—as one size fits everyone. Some writers will say that you lack discipline if you can’t get X number of words each day.

Adding to that are writers who brag about getting 10,000 words in one day or 3,000 every day. We hear that and think that’s every day, not an exceptional day.

But we also aren’t machines. Most of this thinking seems to come out of business and time management advice. Time management advice originated in Silicon Valley and was based on how a computer program runs (that’s why there’s so much advice on efficiency).

In business, metrics, tracking of data, is used to show if a project is successful. Like a campaign selling a certain amount of a product. But there are a lot of problems with it, especially when applied to writing!

When I was stationed at Fort Lewis, I got sucked into writing newspaper articles for the post paper because of this very problem. Our Group (which is similar to a Division) had a journalist slot assigned to them. But they couldn’t keep people. Why? Because to the leadership, if you weren’t doing manual labor they could see (busting tires, carrying boxes, etc.), you weren’t working. Their metric was eyeballing people and seeing they were working.

The result? The soldier couldn’t do his job writing because leadership kept putting him on lawn mowing detail.

Metrics are funny like that, too…and why business have a hard time with people who need thinking or creative time. I might take a walk around the neighborhood to think about a thorny piece of story. But someone—even another writer—might tell me that’s not writing.

Only the physical act of typing the next word is supposed to count.

All this is silliness.

A writer who writes a million words a year, but fails to use it to improve counts more than a writer thinking through their next scene. Or it counts more than a writer who needs to research a topic, which might inspire new writing.

Becca Syme’s Manuscript Time Block (MTB) is an alternate way of thinking about writing and tracking it. An MTB is anything to do with the writing process. It could be the actual writing, thinking about a scene (definitely more fuzzy to track), cycling, revising, researching, and proofreading.

What do you think of tracking word count?