Writing Wednesday

Progress

 

I had a hard time thinking of what I wanted to write about this week. A few things popped up and made me think I wanted to cover those, but then I sent my edits off for proofreading, and this one hit me, progress.

How do we judge progress in our work? When I started writing, I was a total NUB or NOB or FNG, depending on which one you understand. I judged my book by pages. This was a horrible way to do it. Several reasons this was bad. First, I did not indent like I should have. I did not use the 1.5 spacing like I should have, and I used smaller font than I should have.

By the time I was curious to see how long a typical romance book should be, I found out quickly, I really messed up. Word count! Damnit, I was way over at 190k words. Then when I applied proper spacing, I was way up in the 800-page range. WTF did I do?? I mismeasured my progress.

After I was smart and read more regarding book sizing and formatting, I quickly made adjustments. My first massive manuscript was cut in half, roughly. Now, I had two books, and I began to re-evaluate them using the book’s proper setup.

Talk about a massive learning moment when I figured out the basic formatting for what I was writing.

I see many people talking about words in their book. As we know, every genre has different word counts for books; Romance is 50k – 90k. Tracking your progress this way makes a good deal of sense. If you wrap up your story around that number and get everything in, you did a good job. Or if you overshoot, you need to cut some. When you sit down and write 2,000 or 3,000 a day for a while, you can knock out your book in time.

Typically when I write, I note the beginning and ending word count. While I am writing, I avoid looking at it. I also avoid fixing typos until I feel I am at a good stopping point. Sometimes I have a sea of red to fix. Other times I don’t.

Progress can go slow at times. For whatever reason, you get stuck on something, and you can’t get past it. Typically for me, another scene will pop up, and I move on and write it. This is where my “system” of writing different parts to be assembled later comes in. This also skews my progress tracking slightly since I do not have an overall vision of what I have written so far. I have parts that need to be assembled, and then I can get a total.

Keep track of how you are doing and set goals. It is better to reach for something and miss than to just plod away and not really know where you are headed.