I’m already a quarter of the way through my writing goal for the entire year

To recap, this year I completely changed my yearly writing goal up making it harder (as only certain writing counted) and adding percentage based benchmarks to dictate what I had to work on. While there are a variety of smaller goals within this number, I set a goal for the year of 200,000 words. This was double last year’s goal but less than I used to set pre-motherhood. I honestly thought it was going to be a stretch to hit this goal because I’d imposed so many restrictions on my writing this year.

Which is why I’m crazy surprised that I’ve already passed 50,000 words for the year despite it only being February. I’m averaging about 1,000 words a day, double what my goal was and that 50k represents more “real” writing on publishable projects than previous years when I would pad my word count with rambling blog posts (like this one!). I want to do another post about why I think this system is working out so well for me but, in the meantime, let’s look at the numbers.

As I write this (on the evening of 2/24), I’m at 52,647 words for the year. Here’s how that breaks down:

One of my goals was to make sure that I kept it close to 50/50 between all (free and focused) Fiction and Non-Fiction and I’m right there on that. My second goal was to make sure most of my writing was focused and I’m doing great there too.

The one big change I made to the system since the beginning of the year was that I originally grouped playwrighting and prose such as short stories and novel writing together as fiction and I realized that was a mistake. Now the goal is to make sure that Playwrighting, Prose, Non-Fiction each represent 1/3 of all focused writing. Right now I’m not quite there because I only just starting this new measurement a few days ago and I also just came off a big playwrighting project I hope to be able to share with you all soon but I’m gaining fast.

If you’re a regular reader, you’re already guessing where I’m going with this… I think I need to up the goal. On one hand, it’s still really early in the year and there’s still plenty of time for me to crash and burn but, on the other, it’s easier to motivate myself to work if I have to struggle to keep up with my goal than if I’m hitting it easily. While I do think that increasing it is an eventuality, I’m going to wait to do so until I hit 100k because when I hit that will dictate how much I should increase it by.

One thing I never measured before but decided to take a look at this year was how close I came to writing every day. I just put in a little section on my massive spreadsheet that shows the word count for each day making it turn light green as soon as I write anything, dark green if I write over 500 words and red if I don’t write anything that day. Out of 54 days so far this year, I only missed writing on 7 of them and all but two of them happened when I was on vacation so I think I should get a pass. That stat is very interesting to me because I always assumed that I was really bad at writing every day and apparently I’m better at it than I thought.

I don’t want this post to ramble out of control so I’m going to end it here but I just wanted to show you in numbers how well the new system is working and how it’s made a definite, measurable difference in how much writing I’ve gotten done.