A little over a month ago, I stumbled across an article entitled, “Advice on Novel Writing,” (it’s no longer available, but Google has it in its cache). One of the things it suggests is keeping a daily log of your writing progress: “The log can give you a sense of accomplishment, especially on big projects, and can enable you to set realistic completion deadlines.” I’d heard this advice before, but for some reason, I had never done it. I don’t know what it was about hearing the advice this particular time, but for whatever reason, I decided to follow it. I started a daily log of my writing.

Now, right about the same time I started the log, Apple came out with Numbers, which does “spreadsheets the Mac way.” I’m not a power spreadsheet user, so I’m not about to do a review of Numbers that compares it to Microsoft Excel, but I will say that Numbers is a hell of lot prettier that Excel, and it makes maintaining spreadsheets and charts a relatively fun experience.

With the advent of Numbers, I now had an Apple-designed application to help in the creation of my daily writing log, and if there’s anything that’s gonna keep me doing something as mundane as data-entry, it’s the opportunity to use an Apple-designed application. Why? Because I’m a sucker for a quality user-interface.

This is what my Writer’s Log looks like. I’ll discuss the details below.

I started the log on Thursday, September 13. At first, I just planned on keeping track of my daily word count, but Numbers makes it so simple to create a nice-looking multi-column table that I was inspired to come up with some other types of data to track. I came up with:

• The day of the week (Mon., Tues., Wed., etc)
• The calendar date
• The number of NEW words written
• Whether I edited/revised existing words
• The type of writing I did (creative, theory, etc.)
• How happy I was with the writing (rated on a 0-5 scale)
• Any additional comments to explain the rating

I wanted to keep track of the day of the week to figure out which days I do my most writing, and which days I am most happy with my writing, with the idea being that if I do a ton of writing on Sundays, I can start planning my social calendar around this fact and make sure my Sundays are relatively free from outside commitments. At the same time, discovering that I am most happy with the writing I do on Friday nights will help me revise my social calendar even further, perhaps suggesting a shift of any Friday night plans to something more beneficial to my writing, like, say a Tuesday.

I then used this data to create a few charts: one for the total number of new words broken down by days; another for the average happiness rating, again broken down by days; and finally, a pie-chart to reveal the number of new words written per month. You can see the first two charts below (click to see it bigger).

Some things I’ve discovered from this process include:

• There were 12 days during the past 31 where I wrote zero words. I was traveling for five of those day, and I had social obligations for two of them, but the comments left on the other days include:
  • “Simply no writing”
  • “Way too tired after afternoon beers”
  • “No writing because I’m getting sick, but I got a bunch of reading done”
  • Two consecutive days when I “Did a bunch of reading”
  • “Don’t want to edit existing sections; don’t want to start another one”
• I do most of my writing on Sundays and Wednesdays.
• I’m most happy with the writing I do on Wednesdays.
• I don’t write on Saturdays, and when I do, I’m usually not happy with it.
• The most I’ve written in one session is 3,059 words
• The least number I’ve written is 294 words (though to be fair, the “Editing/Revising” checkbox is clicked for that day, which means I accomplished something other than those 294 words)
• The average number of words I write per session is 1,140 words
• Including the 14,378 words that I wrote between September 1 and September 12 (a rough estimate based on a word-count of my second packet), I wrote 26,536 words in September and, thus far, 10,650 words in October.

So…that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the past month, and it helps explains why I’ve been slacking on Fluid Imagination.

Oh, and while I’m giving y’all an update, I should probably add one fact that is not included in the data from my Writer’s Log.

About a week or so ago, my manuscript surpassed 100 pages. I haven’t count recently, but based on the number of words I’ve written since then, I’m guestimating that the length of my manuscript is somewhere around 125 pages.

I’m just now writing the chapter that (I think) will “end” the first third of the book…i.e., I’m writing the end of the beginning. Going on my target of about 3,000 words per section, and my assumption that this chapter will contain at least four sections, I’m guessing that I’ll be done with this chapter somewhere around p. 150 in the manuscript. If everything works out the way I think it will (which it probably won’t), it looks like my novel will be about 450 manuscript pages. So, I’m almost a third of the way there.

Which means that I have to write the final two-thirds between Thanksgiving 2007 and August 2008. That seems doable, right? Of course, you got to factor in the teaching practicum I’ll be doing next semester, which will cut down significantly on my available writing time…but still. It seems doable.

I just hope that, unlike all my good Goddard friends who are currently going through their final semester, my advisor won’t require me to COMPLETELY REWRITE my creative thesis in my final semester (seriously: my friends have to do complete rewrites of their creative theses, and they need to do it in 15 weeks–well, 6 weeks now–if they want to graduate on time; you’re kidding yourself if you think that doesn’t scare the shit out of me).

And that’s what’s going on in my adventures in writing. It’s fun, it’s scary, and it’s frustrating. But I’m still writing. And that’s all I can ask of myself right now.

(P.S.: The words I write in a blog post don’t count, so this post is not long because I want to skew my stats; it’s long because, as a good man once told me, “I’m a verbose motherfucker.”)