Sometimes you use systems to measure things that can’t be measured, because that’s better than not measuring anything at all.

The writer’s daily wordcount is a great example of this. We know, as writers, that you can have a great writing day which only results in 12 words, if they’re the right words at the right time, and you can have a rotten writing day and still produce 3000 words (which may in fact have to be disposed of in a seedy back alley somewhere later). We know that setting a daily wordcount is an imperfect way of recording the progress of a novel.

But those of us who do track wordcounts generally do so because – you have to track something. It’s hard to pin down in a spreadsheet whether you wrote good usable words or crappy steaming piles of crap, but it’s easy to check the wordcounter and type in that today, you achieved 1146 more words than you had yesterday.

Sometimes a work day consists entirely of deleting words, and you know it’s the best thing for the novel, but you still feel glum when you enter a negative number in your little spreadsheet, or word counter. Much the same, I suppose, as someone exercising to lose weight, who knows they have put on muscle instead of fat, and thus have made progress, and yet… the numbers make them sad.

The main reason to track wordcount is that a novel is a huge, unwieldy thing. By dividing it up into small achievable daily goals, you can see your way out of the project, see your way almost to the end. There’s a huge difference between 100,000 words of polished almost-publishable goodness and 100,000 words of draft zero, and yet the numbers matter. They keep us going. They get us out of bed in the morning.

They provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

I honestly don’t know how writers who don’t keep track of wordcount deal with writing a novel. How do they cope without those little happy moments of achieving tangible progress? How do they deal with all the other things that have to be done in their life, if they don’t have a random number that they can hit each day and then feel satisfied that they have “done” their day’s work? Do they measure by hours at the desk? By chapters under their belt?

But there are some days when you can achieve progress, wonderful wonderful progress, without setting any words on the page at all.

I should be writing. I have a deadline for book three, which means I should be writing all the time. Except that you can’t write all the time without your head exploding. Even though it was getting tight, I deliberately took this month after the submission of Book 2, to be “Fallow Time.” In industrial revolution terms, for planting clover. I needed some time to settle, to catch up on life’s messy parts, to read, to work on other projects, to cuddle my baby and hang out with my big girl.

Also, to be honest, I needed a run up. This third Creature Court novel is the biggest thing I’ve ever tackled. It’s a huge, intimidating project, and it has to be pitch perfect, to justify all the work I’ve poured into books one & two. No pressure, right?

It’s been a good month, sort of hectic, and I have been starting to wonder if I’ve made a bad move, because if you’re not writing, other things fill up the writing time so easily. Things like washing up, and listening to school readers, and exercising. Would April Tansy be able to factor writing time into her day? The rest of us Tansies are kind of screwed if she can’t…

Today was writing day at  godiyeva‘s house. Given that I only have a week of March left, I thought it was maybe time that I organised my 50K of Nano words into Scrivener, to be all shiny and ready for April, when I have to turn them into a real book. (Last time I had to put a draft into Scrivener it took 4 weeks longer than I had planned.) It almost didn’t happen. We missed each other the first time, and the baby was cranky all morning, and I was tired from a bad night, and when I finally did turn up at  godiyeva‘s house, we pretty much just sat there and drank tea and talked about our novels.

It was really nice tea.

We had a marvellous chat about historical accuracy in fiction, and Winston Churchill, and just how racist do your 1900′s characters have to be, and how may female characters can you kill off before your book starts looking like Battlestar Galactica, and I confessed that in fact I had no idea about how Book Three ended, and I was starting to get a bit alarmed, because it’s due in July. As is her wont, she made several epic and awe-inspiring suggestions about how to end my book, made all the more entertaining by the fact that she hasn’t read Book One or Book Two.

G: What if the whole city collapses and you leave them to be eaten by forest animals?
Me: Actually they pretty much are the forest animals.
G: Even better! They can all be devoured by wolves.
Me: Yes, she’d like that.
G: It could be a really dark ending, like they have to leave the city and trudge off into the wilderness
Me: Actually I’m pretty sure that’s the light and fluffy ending…

Anyway. I opened my laptop, divided up my sections into Scrivener (it took about 15 minutes, which is about 3 weeks shorter than I was expecting that job to take) and headed off to do my chores.

While driving, and parking, approximately 5 minutes in total, my brain ran over the one single plot twist that I knew was going to happen. By the time my car had stopped, the entire climax had unfolded in my head.

Yesterday I had no idea where this final volume was heading, except that it had to be awesome. Today I know exactly where it’s heading, and why, and exactly what kind of awesome I need to work towards. I know what the final purpose of my most important characters is, and I have a pretty good idea of how to get them there.

And that, my friends, is a productive writing day. I may not have produced a single word to add to my novel, but April is starting to look a whole lot more interesting.

Tags: creature court, saturnalia, scrivener, writing