Somewhere near the end of 2018, I came to understand that my debut novel was, at 62,000 words, still very much a work in progress. I also found out about the Slice Literary Conference that would take place in Brooklyn in August, and I set my sights on getting ready for it. “Getting ready” meant adding almost 8,000 words to the manuscript.
I was determined to be methodical and leave nothing to chance. I cleared off my desk and set to work on creating an Excel file to track my word count. I made columns for the date, for how many days I’d been working, the number of new words I wrote on a given date, the total number of words I now needed to reach my goal, the average daily word count I needed to get in, and the average words per day I was getting in. In other words, the complexities of the chart and the time it took to set it up with formulas that calculated everything with just the insertion of the “Days in” and “Word Count for the day,” began to take on shades of an avoidance technique. But it was worth it. On January 23rd, the first charted day, the numbers were clear – I had 216 days to accomplish the goal of 7,840 words. If I averaged just 36 words a day, I’d have it.
The Excel file proved to be a good companion for the task of showing up to the page. It was both carrot and stick: it was fun to put in the word counts, especially on good days, and there was no way to get around that word count – the numbers didn’t lie, fudge, or make excuses. And it’s good to have that record. Sure, I see the low ebb days sitting there, but if I didn’t have the Excel record to look back on, would I have remembered that on April 20th I added 2757 words to the manuscript? That was a good day.
The number game shifted when I began serious rounds of editing. Sometimes I deleted more words than I added – the total word count was as likely on any given day to go down as go up. And on many, many days I didn’t work on the manuscript at all. Instead, I turned my attention to other projects and wrote thousands of words that didn’t move the manuscript’s word-count needle one tiny bit. When I began a long-planned online course in flash fiction, I veered far off course. Not content with that detour, I headed down a side road and worked on a disaster novel I’d been poking away at, and I wrote the first twenty-two pages of a ghost story.
I kept to my newly acquired Excel habit, though, and added a place in the file for these other long works. That was helpful – even as I worked away, and, by the way, really enjoyed myself – at the end of the day I opened the Excel file to record the word count and was reminded of what I said I wanted to do.
Looking back now, I see from the record of those eight months that fully two-thirds of my work on novel-length projects had nothing, on the surface, to do with my goal for the Slice Conference. I showed up to the page most days, but it was the wrong page. But, oddly, even to me, I wasn’t worried at all. I admit it was a form of small torture to set aside the longer works to create short pieces for that online class. But I didn’t chide myself for that choice or for working on the disaster novel or the ghost story. I knew I needed to take a break from the manuscript so I could see it with fresh eyes. I trusted that delving into the other works would land me in a space from which I’d be ready to approach the manuscript, and that the discipline of steady work would help me come back to it in good writerly form.
The trust was well placed. The Excel file did its work, and I did mine: I passed my conference word- count target on August 4th.
Eudora Watson 