Many writers, such as myself, keep track of our word counts each day. In fact, you can find this data on the home page of this website. It might even be the very first thing you see.
It’s a habit that was recommended to me years ago, and I’ve been meticulously tracking these numbers ever since. At the end of each day, I write down how many words I wrote on a paper next to my laptop. (The same paper that holds my vague ever-changing to-do lists and planning.) At the end of each week—sometimes month—I simply copy all those numbers to my website.
At the same time, I often stumble across messages from writers who hate this. Who will tell you that it’s stupid, and bad, and that you shouldn’t write to some arbitrary number. Many of these writers are quite successful, or can write in a way that I think is “professional”, so I wanted to take a serious look at their arguments.
Am I making a big mistake? Am I ruining things with this “bad habit”? Do I actually recommend tracking your word output as a (new) writer or not?
I wanted to write this short article with my thoughts about that.
The Pros & Cons
Below is a list of reasons for why tracking your word output is good.
- It’s motivating. It makes you feel proud of yourself. Our brains are very good at moving the goalposts all the time, so it’s always good to have an objective number that says: “See, you didn’t waste the day doing nothing, you wrote 500 words!”
- It makes you productive and decisive. You don’t want to “break the chain”. It feels very bad now to have to write down a “zero day”!
- It’s the easiest way to communicate constant progress to any fans. (Or maybe communicate with your publisher/editor/whoever is waiting for this book.) People love to see progress on new projects. It makes them confident in your ability and makes them anticipate getting that book in the future, because you’re clearly doing stuff. In other words: those word counts on the home page of this website make me look good as a writer :p
- It’s a nice habit to double-check other things. My brain is a mess. Like most creative people, I’m quite hyperactive and heavily dislike structure and doing things in order. And so … I can forget that I wrote a chapter. I can accidentally skip a chapter, or forget I never finished one. My brain can believe some task is done, when it really isn’t. By tracking word counts—I usually write a number on the page per chapter—I also track what I have and haven’t done. Inputting those word counts at the end has helped me catch mistakes so many times.
Sounds nice, right? That’s why I started doing this, and am still doing it today.
So, why do many people advocate against it? Why do some pretty serious and capable writers hate this with a passion?
- It puts quantity over quality. In the end, what matters is that you write a good book. It’s not that useful to write X words a day when all of them are crap or have to be scrapped the next day.
- It can add more stress and pressure. Some people really don’t do well under such constraints or targets, because it puts them under too much pressure. And when humans are under pressure, we become tired, indecisive and risk averse. So, either your writing suffers or you can’t get yourself to write at all at some point. (And if you “break the chain” and go a few days without hitting your target, you might feel bad about yourself and give up entirely.)
- Humans (and creativity) are not as predictable as numbers. We all know that our brains just work better on some days, and worse on other days. Sometimes our body is just like “I’m tired, I’m not working at all today”, and we can’t really change that. Nature is flexible and goes in cycles. So … having a fixed number of words you want to reach each day (or week, or writing session) doesn’t fit our creativity. It’s a waste of time to be typing more terrible words when you should be resting and replenishing your creativity instead.
Alright. So what do I think about that?
Tracking =/= Targeting
I think this is the biggest misunderstanding here. Tracking word counts is not the same as having word count targets.
I track, that’s it. Most writers who swear by this habit do the same thing. I keep track of how much I ended up writing each day, without any judgment or conclusions drawn from that. I am absolutely fine writing down “only 200 words today”. I am fine with writing a big fat zero for a few weeks, when I’m doing other work or taking it easy. I don’t have a “target”, I merely track what I happened to do after the fact.
Some people actually have a word count target. They say “I write at least 2,000 words every day”. Or, some people say “I write exactly 2,000 words each day”, and they will stop the second they reach it.
Most of the arguments against this habit, are against having strict word targets. They’re not arguments against merely tracking your word counts.
And with that I agree! I don’t think it’s a good idea to force yourself to write a specific number of words each time. Sometimes you’re simple more creative, or less. Sometimes you have more energy. Or you reached a part of the book that works so well that it writes itself … or, the opposite, you reach a problem in your story that you need to figure out before you can continue.
So, at best, you write a lot of words that are terrible and don’t end up being used. In most cases, however, such a strict target adds immense pressure that will burn you out. And you feel bad about scrapping those thousands of bad words you wrote, so you try to “salvage” it and “edit” the trash into something better, which just wastes even more time :p
Every single time I tried to hit exact word counts, it backfired. My tired brain ended up taking the story down the wrong path. A stupid, silly, obviously bad path in hindsight. And I didn’t realize until several days later, at which point I had to throw away all chapters written in the meantime. If I’d just waited until the next morning, my fresh brain would have written something far better and saved me a lot of trouble. Pieces written this way have way more typos, way more bad decisions, and almost always had to be removed anyway in the end.
Tracking Practically
Now, if you were paying attention, you might say: But those arguments FOR word count targets also fall away if you’re merely tracking!
And that’s right. I just said that I’m fine with “breaking the chain” and having zero days, so that argument isn’t as strong here. If you’re fine with taking days off or writing only 100 words on some days, then you also can’t really call writing a consistent habit. The strongest of arguments fall apart when you merely track, instead of keeping a strict target.
That’s why, over time, I naturally gravitated to a sort of mixture.
You see, tracking your work output gives you data. It tells you stuff about yourself. How many can you typically write in a day? Do you write more on certain days of the week? Do you write less when you’re busy with some side project? Etcetera.
If you gather this data, you will quickly see patterns. Below are some things I learned about myself.
- I can write about 4,000–5,000 words a day.
- I write more at the start of the week or the start of a project. I write less at the tail end of things or on weekends.
- This same number is true for non-fiction as well. For example, I also track word counts of articles I write for this blog.
- Some days I write both fiction and non-fiction, and on those days the number of words can easily reach 10,000 or more.
How do I use this in practice? For example,
- If I’ve just started a new book, and I wrote 2,000 words today, then I know I can push myself for more. I might not be motivated, I might be a bit tired or thinking about something else, but I know that I have it in me to write more. I just know—I have the data. And so, with some confidence, I write one or two extra chapters until I’m somewhere near the usual number of words I write at this time. This has worked every single time.
- If I’ve written my 4,000 words on a book, but there’s a lot of work time left today, then I’ll usually switch to non-fiction. I’ll write some articles I’ve been meaning to write. I’ll type out some future ideas in more detail, or prepare the marketing texts for something well in advance. I will type more words, yes, but of a different kind.Because I have the data that shows me this works, for my brain, on such days. The few times I ignored this and continued writing that book … it never worked out well for me.
That’s what I do. And that’s what I would recommend most writers.
Not all writers. Of course not. Everyone is different. Everyone makes different work and has different lives. Anyone who tells you a “rule” of writing that “all writers should follow” (or, even more annoying, those YouTube videos that say “this is a mistake all newbie writers make!”) … they’re just wrong :p Every single rule of writing, every single well-intentioned advice, has been broken by countless capable and successful writers.
Instead, when I give advice like this, I’m saying: “Here’s what worked for me and why. You can try it. If it works, great, I’ve helped you! If it doesn’t, no worries, try something else until you find what works for you.”
Conclusion
To summarize, my advice is this.
- Track your work output. You can track a single number at the end of a day/week/writing session. You can track in more detail. That’s up to you. Merely tracking words is great for motivation, for objective data, for being able to show progress to others.
- Try to see patterns in that data. When are you most creative? How far can you go before your writing turns to slop? At the very least, I think you’ll be interested to see what comes out of this. Even if you never use it.
- From that, you can create habits and workflows that get the best out of you as a writer. Maybe, in certain situations, a strict word count (“I will write 4,000 words today!”) does work for you. Or maybe you realize that you crumble under such pressure, and make a rule to never set such strict word counts for yourself.
- And in doing this, be kind to yourself. Be honest with yourself. You know when you’re pushing your mind (or body) too much. You know when your writing is sharp and easy … and when you’re putting bad ugly words on the page.
The criticism of word count targets is deserved. It adds a lot of pressure, it makes you less creative, it often leads to wasted work, and it’s not aligned with your actual goal of writing the best possible book.
But it’s often misunderstood to be criticism of merely tracking your word counts, of merely observing your output and trying to use that for better habits. That isn’t wrong, in my opinion; it’s even very helpful.
At least, it has been very helpful to me.
Over the years, the number of words written has steadily gone up, while I’ve had to “fight” with my brain less and less. I just know when I can get X words done, and I know when I can get Y words done, and I also know when it’s a zero day and trying to change that will just lead to burn-out (or terrible, terrible prose).
Those were my thoughts on the topic,
Tiamo