Sunday Salutations Statistics
This might come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, but Tod and I are both nerds. Not just game nerds, but the geekier type of nerds – math, science, and statistics nerds. At the beginning of this year, when I decided to focus on writing more seriously, AKA finishing novels, stories and even pursuing publishing, I started tracking my word counts. So, the post today is about word counts, and what I am doing to increase productivity.
However, first the comparison. I will compare last week when I had a week of vacation dedicated to writing versus the previous 6 month.
My stats for vacation week (fiction writing only):
Monday: 2,042 (typing and dictation)
Tuesday: 1,973 (typing and dictation)
Wednesday: 3,548 (typing and dictation)
Thursday: 4,074 (typing and dictation)
Friday: 1,498 — finished First Draft of Novel! Edit Mode Activated! (typing and dictation)
Saturday: 979 planned as a break / worked on editing a short story (typing only, no dictation)
Sunday: 786 planned as a break / worked on editing a short story (typing only, no dictation)
Average by Day for 2023 January 1st through June 11th:
(Note I don’t include blog posts in calculating this, which are usually written and posted on Sundays.)
Day: with zero / without zero-word days
Monday: 571 / 938
Tuesday: 341 / 560
Wednesday: 383 / 678
Thursday: 361 / 692
Friday: 533 / 943
Saturday: 758 / 1,161
Sunday: 752 / 1,203
When I was looking at my word counts, I noted a few things. First, I have a huge amount of variation in output for zero to two or more thousand. Second, while I didn’t write every day, I almost always was doing something related to writing. But I don’t record anything except items like edited Story Z or outlined story Y. Third, I saw a possible marked increased numbers recently, even when not including the week that I was on vacation.
This last part might be because, in the last three weeks, I have been using a mixture of dictation and typing. I am working to move toward mostly dictation for the first draft, but I am not sure I will wean myself completely from typing and I am not sure I want to do so. I enjoy playing with and honing phrases by typing. Yet, for the sheer speed of getting out what I want on a page as fast as possible, dictation works well for me. Your mileage may vary as they say.
Another possible reason for this increase was because I have been trying to block the scenes out. You will notice that during vacation week I had two very good days with over three thousand words. Those days are the days I worked on scenes that had been blocked out. Tod says it is because it is just creative choices instead of major decisions for this step. This basically means, I know who is going to live and die and the basics of how, but I can color in how to make it fun, entertaining, and just plain delightfully weird.
I will be testing if blocking scenes out and dictation can get me up to over thousand words on a daily basis even with the day job. Oddly, I know that starting dictation and blocking scenes are the same time are confounding factors. And I found a third confounding factor… Because of how I dictate, it might not be that dictation is just faster. It keeps me from having to research how to spell a word – with dyslexia, that is a repeating and time-consuming task. And it also means I don’t wander onto other parts of the internet or social media and get caught in the web.
Much to think about, but I will recap.
Yay, vacation week, oh how I miss you. And I am still riding high from us finishing the rough draft of our first full novel. Tod is currently working on the novel, making edits, comments, straightening tangles and in general being a good coauthor/editor. Tod has not been brought along to the dark side of word count tracking, yet. Although it is only a matter of time.
~ Anna