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All right, we’re writing, we’re reading, and we know why we are here. It’s a good start. So lets jump into something else.

Track your numbers.

You want to write faster? You want to publish more? You want higher quality? You want better control over your ideas? Sure, that’s great. Can it be measured? Because if we can measure it, we can see it change over time. And if we can see it change over time, we can experiment.

That’s the whole purpose of this exercise. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but as long as they remain reasonable and honest, they can be useful. As always, this is not the silver bullet, this is the next tool in our toolbox to make things better. As for things like “writing was pleasant today,” I have serious doubts if it’s worthwhile for testing or experimenting. It’s too fuzzy.

(Quick caveat: I think personal observations can be good, too, but more for stress/mood management. If you are quite the #artiste#, critically important, but not what we’re looking at today.)

Remember our goals: quality, consistency, and sustainability. The numbers we track have to have meaning, and they need to be recorded over and over and over. That sustainability is the most important, as missing them will devalue the entire project.

So start small. We’ll examine a whole bunch today, but just choose one, especially at the beginning. Get used to it, get the systems for it in place, and then add on more. I am no savant; I have a whole stack of data I want to start collecting, but just can’t handle right now. Fewer, reliable numbers always outweigh a stack of unreliable ones.

The most important and the easiest is #word count#. When we sit down to write, at the end, we should record how many words we have written. Accuracy counts, but depending on circumstances, it can vary slightly and often does from any particular “true” count, especially if we use different systems to count at different times. But if we keep consistent, and we don’t fret about a +- 20 word spread, it’s accurate enough.

We only compare counts to ourselves.

Let me repeat that.

We only compare counts to ourselves.

Some of the greatest writers of all time are famous for tiny word counts. Hemingway, as one of my English teachers reminded us #with pride#, wrote 500 words a day on average. There are numerous writers, both past and present, of all levels of literariness, who hit between 5000-10,000 a day.

It doesn’t matter.

I write faster than most people, but I’ve got a high 70s wpm typing speed. And I ramble. I end up with too much, mostly garbage, which makes editing hell. Hemingway did five hundred good words a day. I don’t agree with that idea, but it clearly worked for him, so I can’t really say anything.

The word count to does a few things: we know how many days we actually sit down to write. We can see the zero days, and counter them. If there is a day where the count is particularly high or low, we can look for causes. And, if we are training to write faster, graphing the averages can show us if the training is actually working.

Next, I’ve been tracking the #starting and ending editing word count# going in and coming out of editing. I want to cut a minimum of 10%, if not 25% or more, whenever I sit to edit. Knowing where I started and where I ended keeps me aware of that.

That’s me, however, and I have years of knowing how I write to look back on and see how my drafts always turn out. I try to cut back, but in some cases we need to add in to thin spots. The first few times, record it, but don’t think about it. Focus on what makes better writing, and then, see if that has a pattern. If we’re doing multiple edits, another good strategy I’ve learned recently is to do a primary edit by cutting as much as possible, and then backfill with more detail as needed.

I’ve started #dating# whenever I sit down to do work on a draft, edit, or prepare it for posting. It’s quick, it helps me keep track of the numbers above, and there’s editing styles where knowing when we wrote it is useful. That one time I’ll need to know when I worked on a piece? I have that information now. I do multiple edits, each dated with start/end counts, as well as dating it when it’s posted.

One more quick one is #tracking what I’m listening to while writing#. Music and background sounds seem to affect my writing. I think we all have that sense, and I want to start building a data set for it. If I don’t listen to music, I list what I hear around me, even if it’s silence or people talking, to keep in habit.

And the last one, which I have been failing at — including during the draft and first edit (but not the second! [or the final, yay!]) — is to track #time spent writing#. If we know how long each stage takes, we can better schedule time. It also gives a powerful tool with our word counts: words per hour (WPH).

WPH standardizes our word counts, across days and across different writing session lengths. Some days, we only have ten minutes to write; seeing a count of 120 words surrounded by 1000 counts is frustrating, even knowing we had less time to do it in. If it took an hour to do 1000 words? 720 instead of 1000 is much less bad. And if the 1000 took two hours? 720 v 500. That’s worth investigating.

WPH can reveal lots: days we get distracted, or can’t really write fast, or passion suddenly knocking out a couple thousand words at once, or pressure pushing us past our normal limits… WPH and word count and time, all together, gives a much more nuanced view of how we write. It doesn’t tell us why, but it tells us something happened. WPH is also very sensitive; if there is a change, it will tend to show up. That can also make it hard to find the cause of such changes, so deliberate experiments and tests are more important to us when looking for changes here.

Most of all, having a large data set, for any of these, will help give us insight. That’s why we should start tracking , even if we aren’t working on “serious” projects yet. It takes time for the database to get built; start now.