This isn’t about grammar or punctuation. Writing books might be easier by the numbers. We can use numbers to keep our productivity steady. That art of steady is what we’re after. Put enough days of steady together and your productivity will be high.
The hardest part of my writing practice is creating first drafts. Composing summons the characters and ideas out of the storage place of my mind, and sometimes, from my heart. Everything is amorphous and fuzzy as the words emerge for the first time.
The self-doubt can be higher at the start, too. Robert Heinlein, sci-fi god, was among many authors telling us quantity would equal quality. There’s a another step in there, revisions, but Heinlein’s not wrong. You have nothing to improve without those first-draft words.
How many words do we need? To create a book, 20,000 seems to be a reasonable bottom end. That’s a novelette, or maybe a fundamentals guide or an essay collection. I think 40,000 words covers a lot more possible books. In the journalism business, we thought of a long piece as 4,000 words. That target is one of the reasons that the AI bots are making headway on nonfiction writing. The assignments are short enough to limit their mistakes and lies.
So now we have a rough guide on minimums. The popular Murderbot books all are under 50,000 words apiece. How do we get there when we don’t have a routine and a ritual in place? We count our words in the smallest bucket we can find. We complete one assignment at a time.
That means we try not to look at the biggest number very much. Instead, break the writing down into 20 or more assignments. A 50K book could be 2,500 words a go, but even that can be a lot. However, we can make that a weekly goal and get away with 500 words a day — with two days off every week.
If you’re unmotivated by numbers, consider what else you might be able to count up. Develop a number of characters who will deliver beats in your story, if youre in fiction. Or subjects, if you’re at work on nonfiction or memoir. Write about each character, putting them into a scene that affects what’s at stake.
Once you’re in the realm of those beats, though, you want to be careful what you’re counting. Beats are at the heart of progress, whether it’s the logic and discovery of nonfiction, or the dramatic sweep of novels and memoir. (Yes, memoir can be both things, nonfiction and dramatic. This is one reason memoir is so hard, as well as so rewarding.)
If you enjoy quantifying your creativity, you might have found a way to establish a routine and a ritual. What about all of those beats, though? I heard a bad piece of advice this month about the number of beats in a chapter. Ten to fifteen, for every chapter. If your chapters run about 3,000 words at most, you need to make a change in the story or a development between characters every 300 words. A change on every page might do it.
When you’re making a list of such changes, you might be a slave to the numbers. Or you might be making a super-outline, one step away from a synopsis. Deep in details, you’re looking hard before you write — and that might make the whole book thing feel like an exercise in polishing the silver, one spoon at a time.
Given how low the numbers are for typical pay for writing, polishing silver feels unrewarding. If you’re fortunate enough to be an author who can take longer to make a book, you may not need to count the silver. But counting the words gives us a measurement of progress, and making progress is good for keeping our spirits high. That will keep the productity climbing, too.
