Yesterday, I started work on a new short story, working title The Furnace Season. It takes an idea I had back at the start of 2020, when the news was all terrifying bushfires instead of terrifying plague, but I threw out everything except the vague concept and started telling the story from scratch.
Normally, for a project like this, I’d be here counting words and tracking progress. Force of habit, because I’ve counted words like that for years. Counting words is what writers did on the internet for the first few years that blogs and social media were a thing.
This time around, I’m eschewing wordcount for a simpler metric: did I work on the story today, or not? Did I finish a scene, or not?
This emerged from my morning journal a few weeks back, when I was frustrated with my progress on Median Survival Time and posed myself a question about the efficacy of the metrics I’m tracking: do I want to be writing words, or do I want to be writing stories?
There’s a tangled knot at the heart of this question, which comes back to what I want from my writing, and what I know about my habits. Specifically, I know one important thing about myself: I really dislike redrafting.
It’s verbotten to admit this in most writing circles, and many of the great writers I know are meticious redrafters. The kind of people whose process involves throwing a rough guide then spendig months sanding off the edges. My brain struggles with that kind of effort, as evidenced by the metric fuckton of ‘rough drafts’ on my hard drive and notebooks that have never advanced to the finished stage.
For me, writing works best when I’m living in a draft and fixing as I go, shoring up edges and clipping dead ends while it’s a work in progress. One of the things that energizes me is finding the right narrative voice and the right contrast to make a scene click, and writing a ‘vomit draft’ to be fixed later often means I’m pulling further and further from the thing that excites me about writing.
So the metric I’m tracking with The Furnace Season is not how many words did I do, but how close did I get the current scene to ‘finished’? I’m writing noticably fewer words this way — two days in, and i’ve finished a single scene that’s just 900 words long — but I’m moving onto the next scene confident I won’t have to go back and rewrite.
More importantly, I woke up this morning to the sound of my partner throwing up on the couch, which meant the first hour of writing time was given over to cleaning and washing cushions and generally taking care of a poorly spouse. I expect the prospect of writing 750 words wouldn’t have gotten me to the keyboard after that, but I was energized by the thought of finishing the scene Is tarted yesterday.
I’m doing taxes this week, both the current year (aaarg) and outstanding taxes from the years 2012-2016 (AAAARG!) when I didn’t have the spoons for anything beyond dragging my carcass to work and back.
It’s interesting to watch the steady decline of writing income across those years, which is partially attributable to picking up a regular job and the chronic sleep apnea, but I’m also pondering the impact of acquiring a copy of Scrivner and it’s fancy word count tracking features in early 2012.
There’s plenty of days when chasing that word count was a useful way of pulling me forward, but occasionally I wonder if it slowly shifted my focus from the only metric that mattered – what’s actually finished and ready to go out into the world? Does it really matter if I can push myself to write 2,000 words a day if the resulting words are stories that never get finished, or finished drafts that never get turned into a story I’m willing to publish?
The Furnace Season isn’t a reliable test of this theory, although it genuflects in that direction. There’s a lot of variables the above doesn’t cover, and my satisfaction may well stem from doing something new after trying to resolve the issues with Median Survival Time for nigh on five years now (although I’m noting that I’ve also done work on MST, and Knock, Knock pt 3, while working on this one).
But I’m no the verge of doing a six-month test that will carry me through tot he end of the year. Six months where all I track is whether I worked, and what gets finished, without bothering to count words at all, just to see if it results in a meaningful difference in how much I get done.