Re: What counts as progress?

In message <slrngb0n87.rl0.putamnerishere@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Karin Almehed <putamnerishere@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
On 2008-08-23, Helen Hall <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A lot of us keep logs or spreadsheets to record our writing progress
because it helps our motivation, but what counts as "progress"?

Normally I count new words, but I just realised today that I felt I
hadn't been making any progress, yet I have been writing, about 2000
words probably, but as they were just freewriting exercises, they didn't
"count".


I count new words too, and sum them up at the end of the day. As for
exercises, I almost never do an exercise that isn't relevant -- for
something. So if I don't count is as progress for the wip, there's
probably some other w that I could count it as progress for. (I usually
don't but I could if I wanted to.)

There are some ideas that I might develop that have emerged from the exercises, but mostly it's stuff that I'm doing because the course wants me to do it. :) As I've been suffering from writer's reluctance (not quite as serious as writer's block, but still results in no forward progress) for a while, I thought that any writing was better than no writing.

[snip]

One should keep in mind that this way of doing it means two different
figures to keep track of. One is the daily wordcount, which always grows
upwords, since you can't write a negative number of words. The other is
the size of the actual wip, which can go up and down. Hopefully it's more
up than down.

Yes, my novel tracking spreadsheets record both words written that day and the current size of the chapter I'm working on and the total words in the novel. As words get deleted as well as added, if you added up the words written, it must work out as more than the total in the novel.

And what about revision? I've logged that in the past using "time
spent", but that's not ideal. Otherwise I count "number of words
revised", but that's also deceptive as there can be whole scenes that
need little doing, so the "words revised" doesn't really match well with
effort expended.


I count pages. A page, in this case, is texed and printed and may
contain something like 400 words. After revising it can be more or less
than that, of course.

I worked by "pages revised" when I was doing the revision pass of _Moving a Mountain_.

I think 'pages' makes sense a little in the same way as 'words' make
sense for a first draft. In revision, you have to step back and look at
the text from a little bit further away. Not only 'Should this word be
replaced by another?' or 'Can this sentece be rephased?', but 'Is this
paragraph repeating too much from that two pages ago' and 'Is this scene
too quick?' 'Page' is a decent unit for that.

That's a good way of looking at it because you're right, a revision pass should be looking at larger units than words -- unless it's the final polishing pass, of course.

Helen

--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk
.

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