2014: The Year in Writing debriefed

Happy New Year! Today’s the last day to grab New Year’s Thieve for free on Amazon and then you never have to hear me go on about it again so I know you’re excited about that!

But before we dive head first into 2015, I wanted to take a moment to look back at my 2014 writing year. This was a small writing year, only 11 months or 334 days because I decided change things so that my writing year starts in December next year, but it was a big year for a lot of reasons. I just doesn’t make sense to dive into the new year without taking a moment to look back and learn from the old so, let’s do this.

Words written in 2014: 406,253

Average words per day: 1,216

Let’s just stop right there for a second. It was only a few years ago that I was struggling to write anywhere near 500 words a day and now I’m doing more than double that. Add in that that’s my highest total word count EVER and it’d be fair to call 2014 a success on that alone. But wait, there’s more!

Here’s how those words broke down:

My goal for the year wasn’t just to write more but also to hit a couple of benchmarks with the aim of getting more productive writing done (ie finishing things for submission vs blog posts like this). One of these goals was to keep Free writing (which I defined as journaling, blog entries and other writing that’s more for me than it is for publication) as less than 25% of my total. As the year went on, that 25% seemed too low so I stopped worrying about that goal and just tried to work on Focused stuff as much as possible. I ended up with 67% of all my writing being Focused work on specific projects for publication and that’s great because I know it’s much higher than in the past. What I realized is that I’m not really sure if I should be limiting my free writing since writing about whatever the heck I want without having to worry about publication is important to my process and sanity though I always feel like I could be doing more Focused work. But there’s no denying that I got more productive writing done this year than any other year so, though I’m not 100% sure what to do here, I think I’m going to leave this benchmark at 50% next year and see what that does for me.

Now for the genre goals. I originally had all fiction bunched together with the goal of keeping it half of my total Focused work and that was it. But I quickly realized that I needed to make playwrighting and prose (novels, shorts stories, etc) separate categories. Throughout the year, I tried to keep those numbers even so I was devoting 1/3 of my writing time to each. It was very handy for keeping me focused (see Writers: Harness plot bunnies by doing the project hop! for more on how this part of my goal worked) and, for most of the year, I kept them pretty even.

I want to tweak this part of my goal for next year but I’m not exactly sure how. While it worked, it had some flaws that I’m not sure how to adjust for. Sometimes I have to focus on a single project (such as a novel for NaNoWriMo or the deadlines I was under with Sell Their Stuff and TLOTO one-act version) and then I get so far behind in the other genres that I end up devoting a big chunk of time to just one or the other, killing the genre hopping benefit that makes the system work in the first place. I also realized that Playwrighting is much less wordy than the other two so I could probably lower that mark slightly. Right now, I’m leaning towards making Playwrighting’s goal 30% and then make the other two 35% each but I may also add a fourth category for short stories and freelance. The good thing about this is that it’s super easy to adjust this on the fly so I’m not worried about having it set in stone right now.

That said, I cannot recommend setting percentage based goals enough, particularly if you write in multiple genres. I already told you how I wrote more than I ever did this year but, beyond the quantity, the quality of what I accomplished this year was so far beyond any year I’ve ever had. I made real headway in all three genres and, instead of just obsessing over one or two projects, I was always doing real productive work on three at once. I was afraid this would mean I’d be stretching myself too thing but, instead, it just made me get more done.

I’m still not religious about writing everyday but my progress is steady. Take a look at the chart.

There are some major hills and valleys (holy NaNoWriMo, Batman) and I think it’s always going to be like that. Life is chaos. It’s good chaos but it’s going to be a long time before I’m one of those people with a nice predictable regimented schedule and that’s fine. If anything, the fact that I got this much done without writing every day is a testament to having created a great system to keep the momentum going and keep myself focused and working in the little bits of time I do get.

And speaking of harnessing what works for you…My biggest months were April, July and November. What do those months have in common? NaNoWriMo. I get that it’s not for everyone but I also say, if the motivation of the event DOES work for you, use it, baby. You just can’t argue with those numbers.

I was going to tally up how many projects I finished but there’s no point because, honestly, the fact that it’s several and not just one is the real news here. I published two plays, two non-fiction books and put a bunch of other things in motion for the future. As a writer, that’s really the best thing you can do!

I want to build on this momentum going forward. My biggest focus for 2015 is finishing and submitting things. I’ve got too many drafts that are not quite done yet that I need to get finished and out the door. I just need to come up with a way to incorporate some kind of finishing bonus into this system and I’ll be all set. Unfortunately, right now I’ve got nothing but, if I come up with something, you know you’ll be the first to know!