Wordcount Escalation Woes

Elizabeth Bear wrote a fantastic newsletter about creativity and bad habits last week. You can read it online, if you’re not a subscriber, but subscriptions are a magical thing.

The really useful take-away, meditating on the internet and productivity and the psychology of creativity:

Measuring one’s self against the internet rarely turns out well. Unless you’re reading dub one-star reviews of your favorite book to make yourself feel better about the dumb one-star reviews of your own book, because obviously some people failed reading comprehension and don’t know it. (This works until you start getting angry on behalf of Watership Down, because it deserves so much better than “There are no boating accidents in this novel, if I could give it zero stars I would.**)

The thing is, a thousand good words a day is a pretty good rate. But it’s hard to remember that when everybody around you is engaged in wordcount escalation, or the deadlines and the sewer bill are looming. And the worse we feel about our work, the more likely we are to avoid it. Or to throw ourselves into it in long, compulsive bursts that don’t actually increase your productivity: they just exhaust us and don’t leave room for recovery.

I’ve been watching the trend towards word-count escalation among writers for a few years now. I put it on the program of one of the early GenreCons, because I thought it was important: Rachael Aaron’s post about going from 2k a day to 10k had just gone viral, and self-publishing was just starting to pick up on the write-a-lot-and-publish-often business model which has metastasised into release-dozens-of-books-per-year-and-rapid-release-everything business model that dominates the conversation right now.

The problem with these conversations is, on one level, they make so much sense. When your product is the written word, doing more words means you’ve got more to sell. In an industry that’s predicated on uncertainty, and where work is frequently undervalued, writing more feels like a source of control over things.

Sometimes, that plays out the way people hope. Sometimes, trying to rapidly escalate their word count pulls them further and further away from what drew them to writing in the first place.

Obviously, I have no problem with trying to write all the things and write them fast. I did, after all, sign up to attempt a 600k year of NaNoWriMos once upon a time. At the same time, tellingly, I failed at that attempt, coming in at 380,000 or so, very little of which is ready for prime time and still needs work before it’s publishable.

These days, I’m content to be slower, even if the occasional daily log suggests I’m doing an awful lot. That’s a function of a PhD scholarship that affords me more time to think, and tinker, and focus, not any particular speed on my part when it comes to producing words.

Next year, when my scholarship runs out and I’m fitting writing around a dayjob once more, I fully expect to find myself edging forward a handful of words at a time.