Dispatches: 8 Months of Personal Writing Projects in Review
My writing process often involves cataloging my hours worked, and I’m due for a review. What the heck have I been doing these past few months?
Dispatches
When I first wrote the following article, I hadn’t intended it to be part of any sort of series. Since then, I’ve posted regular updates about my personal writing projects (specifically a fantasy project you can find the beginnings of here), making this the first entry in my ‘Dispatches’.
Eight months after my first article on Medium, I’ve not published a whole lot on the platform. At least by Medium standards. But I have been writing, and I’m proud of that output, I think. I’d just feel a heck of a lot more sure about it if I knew what all I’ve been doing.
Usually, when working on a singular major project, I catalog my work, hours, words, etc., to get a better idea of my progress and time spent per task. But after this year’s move from novel-writing to working on stories, short fiction, poetry and such (which began about 8 months back), I feel like I’ve lost track of those stats altogether.
So, to get a better idea of where I’ve been as a writer for most of this year, I figure that an audit of sorts is in order. An experiment, documenting word counts, hours spent, the whole shabang. This’ll be my attempt to better break down and bring to light my personal writing process, and along the way, maybe I’ll bring helpful information to a handful of readers! Of course, the goal here isn’t to promote the projects I’m working on — it’s to provide the sort of transparency that’s inspired me in the past.
In the case of this fantastic series on the cost of self-publishing by William Shunn, for instance, I learned some truly invaluable lessons about writing, just from seeing another writer’s struggles, process, and results…this is merely my attempt to do something similar.
Knowing how another person’s process works really can be instrumental in figuring out your own — if you aren’t sure that’s true, just check out sales for Stephen King’s On Writing.
But I’m no Stephen King, just a guy with a laptop and (at best) an 11th grade Language Arts vocabulary. So here goes:
Writing on Medium: 16 Articles, 2 Series, and Way Too Many Words Per Story
At the time of writing, I’ve posted 16 articles here since April 29th. Again, nothing in comparison to those who are dedicating even part-time hours to their efforts here and can maintain those rather rigorous publishing schedules of one per week (or more?!?).
- 16 stories across ~30 weeks: Average of 1 story/2 weeks
- Total Word Count: 29,909
- Avg Word Count/Story: 1,869
- Highest Wordcount: 2,517 (first article in a publication)
- Lowest Wordcount: 686 (first story)
- Avg Minutes to Read/Story: 8.5
- Avg. Hours Spent/Story (ideation, drafting, revision, publication): 3–6
- Completed Series: 2
- Series in Progress: 1
- Publications Submitted To: 3
- Crappy Drafts Sitting in My Medium Account, From Which They Will Never Emerge: 1
- Crappy Drafts Sitting on My Computer, From Which They Will Never Emerge: Fathomless
Looking at those stats, I see that my word count/story is way higher than I think it should be, but maybe I’m wrong on that front. Writing in writer publications, ironically enough, demands lower word counts, from my experience. But my longer-form work on movie reviews/criticism has kept that avg count/story high, and they’ve found a bit more success and better reading time metrics — definitely has something to do with the visual density/availability of visual breaks in the movie reviews especially, so that’s something to consider…
I’d also say that, in review, the film review series I worked on this fall has been my favorite Medium project thus far. Broke me out of my comfort zone into a field of writing I’d only admired from afar for many, many years. But all of that warm fuzzy personal success stuff aside, how many words did I write? Because that’s all that really matters, right?
Now, if that total word count of 29k was all I had to show for the last 8 months, there’s an off chance that I’d be disappointed in myself. Of course, every writer is different — but in my case, I write every day, for about an hour (often an hour and a half) each morning, just on personal projects. For now, Medium is part of that rotation.
Beyond Medium, though, here’s what else I’ve been working on:
Short Fiction: 3 Very Sad Short Stories
These short stories, together, constitute a little ‘Southern’ short story collection that I’m quite proud of. It’d been a long time since I’d just put together a good short story, and all three of these were real labors of love that I’m excited to have done. They were, truly, a worthwhile challenge.
- Total Word Count: 11,865
- Avg. Word Count: 3,955
- Characters Killed Across All Stories: Like 6 (90% of those are from story 3, I swear)
I’ve also spent much of my ‘writing time’ these days submitting two of these stories, shooting for one day of submission-focused work each week.
- Literary Journal Submissions Sent Since May: 21
- Submissions Declined: 5
- Submissions In Progress/Received: 16
- Tears Sucked Back Into My Tear Ducts With Great Force: 27
- Heart: Of Iron
Experimental Fiction: Edits & Additions to My Weird Aliens Thing
Though I started writing on Medium as a way of taking a break from novel-writing, there’s one smaller, experimental ‘novel’ in progress I chewed on for a few weeks, adding portions here and revising chapters there. Not a book, yet, but still something interesting, with enough work completed in it during this time to warrant an entry:
- ‘Sections’ Written: 6
- Total Word Count: 1,911
- Words/Section: 318
- Reasons For Me to Keep Working on This: 0
- Number of People Who’d Want to Publish This: 0
- Number of Aliens in the Story: >0
- Reasons For Me To Keep Working on This [UPDATED]: >0
Poetry: A Small Collection With One Hummingbird Poem
And then, there’s the poetry, most of which I wrote in a spurt of inspiration last month, I think. I’ve had a lot of positive reception for my poems in the past, but I’m not really sure I want to pursue that route. Still, I wonder if I need to switch gears from the publication/submission standpoint and take a whack at submitting some of these bad boys. Who knows.
- Poems Written: 17+
- Total Word Count: 1,657
- Words/Poem: 97
- Lines That Definitely Rhyme: A Few
- Lines That Don’t Really Rhyme: More Than A Few
DND Worldbuilding Project: Histories, Chapters, and One-Shots, Oh My
And finally, the way-too-large DND-centric worldbuilding project that’s been occupying about 70% of my brainspace for the past week and a half. Kind of not a writing project, by my own personal definition. But also, enough of a writing project that I’ve been dedicating my writing time to it. So, writing indeed?
- Histories Drafted: 7
- Total Word Count: 10,355
- Words/Doc: 1,479
- Deities Outlined: 42
- City Histories Concocted: 45
- Highly-Detailed Maps Created, Even Though It’s Not Really Writing: 1
- Hours Spent on Said Map: 15+
- Level of Excitement About Someday Actually Using This Map During a DND Campaign: 26
- Campaign Docs: 2
- Total Word Count: 2,083
- Words/Doc: 1,041.5
- Brainpower Expended: 31%
- Narrative Chapters: 1
- Word Count: 1,101
- Brutal Murders Depicted: 1
- Epic Aragorn Knockoffs Created: 1
- Ideas of Where to Take It From Here: 0
And aside from all of that, each of these projects have included hours of brainstorming, editing, polishing, publishing, and even correspondence/review with writing buddies. Then, there are the unfinished/unpublished works, which are terribly hard to keep track of, though they can easily constitute a substantial bit of work and time. Start and stop drafts, unused thousand-word outlines, you get the picture.
But with all said and done, one final review at what I’ve been working on — which, maybe, will show me something new:
Personal Writing Project Stats: April to November
- Total Words Written: 58,881
- Total Hours Worked (1/day not Including Weekends and Sort of Factoring in Some Out-of-Hours Time Spent Writing): ~150
- Avg Words Written Per Day (& Per Hour): 392
- Number of Projects ‘Completed’: 20
- 16 Non-Fiction Articles
- 2 Series (Travel Memoirs and the Movie Curriculum)
- 3 Short Stories
- 2 Submitted for Publication
- 17 Poems
- 1 Collection, some submission-ready
- Not including songs/music
- Money Earned: $0
- Mornings Where I Stared at a Wall or Ditzed Around on Google News/Reddit Instead of Writing: 10ish
- Minutes Until I’m Supposed to Start Work This Morning: 4
- Prospects of Eating Breakfast Between Now and Then: Negligible
So there you have it. Or, there I have it. As you can see, my data methodology is highly meticulous and well-documented and warrants no criticism or revision whatsoever — go ahead and put this on your end of quarter reports, investors.
But really — what surprises me? Well, I’m pretty excited about my average words per day. That count — 392 — could be a lot lower, considering how many days I just don’t write, or just stare at the screen, or take a week off while on vacation or whatever.
But 392 shows me that I’m more consistent with this hobby/practice/effort than I would have originally thought. And that count also reflects what I’d considered to be finished projects, for the most part (even without the slipshod/in-progress DND project, it’s still a solid 325 words/day).
The extrapolated rate of about 1,000 words outlined, written, and polished every 3 days or so is more than a fine number on my account, so perhaps that’s the general productivity pace I want to be shooting for. At that rate, I could be finishing 40,000 word novel drafts in a little over four months (which, more or less, aligns with my previous productivity stats from previous novel projects).
But, to be real here, writing obviously isn’t about ‘productivity.’ My word count isn’t a measure of my success, only a measure of the work completed. The sense of success from this activity comes from an entirely different bit of questions altogether, without a doubt the most important bullet-list on this entire dang post:
- Am I writing what I want to write?
- Am I challenging my habits and honing my skills as a writer?
- Am I taking risks, moving forward?
- Am I having fun?
- Am I saying something worthwhile?
- …Should I be doing this at all?
To some of those questions, though, the data above allows me to put forth a more informed answer. With 5 different projects/genres that I’ve been working in, I have to say that I’m challenging myself and having fun. I couldn’t see myself spending so much time writing, putting out that many words with that much variety, and not having enjoyed it — that would have been a hell of sorts. And it really wasn’t.
I can also probably say that I’m taking risks as well, seeing as I’ve submitted to more publications during this season of my life (on Medium and elsewhere) than I ever have before (and with some positive reception, I think!). Still, there’s more that I could be doing on that front. I’d love to punch up the number of literary journals I’ve submitted to, my number of works submitted, and continue bolstering my good publication credits/bylines. That’ll be a major area for improvement, though it’s better than where it was last year.
And the last, most important questions: am I saying something worthwhile? Writing what I want to write? Should I be doing this at all?
For those, I don’t know that I’ll ever have an answer. But sometimes all I need to do to reassure myself of what I’m doing is to remember what I’ve done. To be able to say that I’ve completed and achieved goals that I’ve set out for myself, improved and learned and grown and had a blast along the way. There are plenty of arguments to be made and unmade about the philosophical purposes of what I’m doing, or the psychological itches I’m trying to scratch.
But right now, I don’t know that I have the energy for that sort of inquiry. I don’t know that I have need for it either. Not at this particular moment.
Right now, I can look back on the work of this year and just be grateful that it’s come to pass. And, from there, I can put myself to more work, inspire myself to keep pushing, working, waiting, and wondering what it all means, what it’s all worth.
I wonder if the wondering just might be part of the fun of it, in the end.
Perhaps I’ll put together another productivity review of sorts later on, a little further down the line. But if anything, I hope this work might inspire writers to take a look at their own work in a similar fashion, to set more concrete goals for themselves, perhaps, or maybe just learn more about their own writing process and philosophy through how it contrasts with my own.
If any of those end up applying to you, do let me know — it’s great to hear from other creators working through the same questions and prospects that I’ve got.
And if not — just keep writing. That’s what I’ll be doing.
