Many writers find ways to procrastinate from actual writing, and I’m certainly one of them.
Finishing Average
My most recent affliction is completing statistics about my projects; beginning with Chuck Wendig‘s Finishing Average. This is the number of finished novels, divided by the number of novels overall.
As I’ve not started TFG yet, this is 5/9 = 0.56.
Now though, I’ve stretched further, looking at each project in turn; creating a chart of the novel, draft, status and percentage completed. It makes me feel rather accomplished to see everything in progress and completed.
Novel 1 (2009) 1: Shelved 100%
Novel 2 (2010-2013) 1: For Redrafting 50%
Novel 3 (2010-2014) 3: For Redrafting 30%
Novel 4 (2011) 1: Shelved 100%
Novel 5 (2012-2014) 7: Rewritten 100%
Novel 6 (2012) 1: For Editing 100%
Novel 7 (2013) 1: Shelved 30%
Novel 8 (2013) 1: For Completion 40%
Novel 9 (2014) 1: Rewritten – Editing 100%
Novel 10 (2014) Planning 0%
Using this method, I can see I have finished over half of the novels I’ve started, and have 4 projects awaiting more work (not bad out of 9) which is a nice little reminder.
Words Per Day
Adding all the daily word counts and dividing by 181 days (6 months), I wrote 527 wpd. Considering I wanted to write 429 each day from April — the fact I’ve surpassed that even across the three months I didn’t have that goal — well, I felt pretty smug when I found out.
And what’s more motivating than surpassing your own expectations?
Number of Drafts
This is a tricky one for me. Do I count those Shelved, one draft stories? Do I count every edit before I then re-write?
Looking at the number of word documents I have for Planes Shifter (in all it’s forms, right from the first spat out beginning I then erased), I think I have something like 24 documents of attempted story for that one project written. However, if we’re talking major overhauls where the story has shifted due to actual editing, we’re looking at 6 or 7 main versions.
This is part of my reasoning behind planning TFG in so much depth; to limit the required redrafts.
Words of Novel Written
A few months ago I saw a comment about someone “having written over a million words of fiction”, which got me wondering about my own ‘experience’ in terms of wordcount. So I went back to each of my nine novel attempts, and counted one draft of each (usually the most recent version, since I’d count that as fairly okay quality writing). My score at the end of June?
564,000 words. Not including the half-drafts (or 23 previous versions), short stories, flash fiction, articles or blog posts.