November was National Novel Writing Month. I did not write a novel this month. I did take part in the general spirit of the month, broadly defined. I decided I would set a goal of writing a bunch, a bunch more than I would have otherwise. More specifically, I decided I would aim for 15,000 words in November, an average of 500 words a day. (National Novel Writing Month encourages people to do 50,000 words. That’s more than I could have done this month.)
Each time I wrote a post in November I did a word count on it, to help me see if I was meeting my goal. I don’t like one aspect of that. The number thing is aesthetically displeasing for some reason I can’t exactly put my finger on. The good part is that I know how many words I wrote, and I also like clear goals that involve clear standards of interpretation. (”Write a whole bunch” is more vague than “write 15000 words.”) That sort of clarity helps keep me motivated.
I didn’t count writing that I wrote for another purpose but posted here for archiving, as the spirit of the attempt was to write stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise written. I did count stuff that I wrote here and then later used in some form elsewhere.
I had initially imagined trying to post 500 words every single day. I kept to that schedule pretty well for a while but it got harder as the month went on - holidays, other work and deadlines, etc. I still tried to think of it that way. I often didn’t have any trouble going over 500 words once I started writing, and I didn’t want to get into a “I wrote 1000 today so I can take tomorrow off” kind of thing. While my measures were in total words the issue was almost as much one of writing discipline as total written amount.
The evening of November 14, about halfway through the month, I calculated the number of words I’d written so far. At that point I had written 11214 words, an average of 801 words per day for 14 days. I just tallied the posts since then, up through November 30. In that time I wrote 13593 words. That’s a total of 24807 words, Using a rough estimate of 300 words per page (double spaced, 12pt font, Times New Roman), this is 82 or 83 pages. I averaged about 827 words per day. I averaged about 850 words per day in the last 16 days of the month.
That feels pretty decent. I’m sure it added to my being worn out and all, but whatever.
This is possibly the single boringest post I have ever written. Christ, I sure hope it is! If I’ve written something even boringer than this then I don’t want to know.
Comment by Nate — December 11, 2007 @ 11:53 pm