I’ve watched my writing grow from ink-eyed youthful innocence, to awkward adverb-heavy pubescence, to logical, reasonable, rhetorical adult. He’s grown strong and independent and I’m pretty proud of him. And yet, as he tries to go off into the world, I’ve had a hard time letting go of his hand. He thinks he’s ready enough, old enough, brave enough to face the cruel world of the internet and rejection letters. I, his creator and biggest supporter, am not so sure. Part of me thinks he’s ready, even at times knows he’s ready, while another part of me thinks he’s a naive little boy who doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into.
I often have this notion that my writing is not quite “there yet” like a relentlessly questioning 8-year-old kid near the end of a cross-country road trip. But therein lies the problem: “there” (wherever it is) is nebulous, gelatinous. It’s damn near impossible to put into concrete terms. When does a writer know his or her writing is strong enough to compete and standout in the the great ocean of text? When can I, with confidence, turn around in my driver’s seat and tell my writing that we have officially arrived at our destination?
To appease my ever-pestering left brain, I decided to try to quantify my progress. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes the “10,000 hour rule,” the idea that if a person dedicates 10,000 hours to working on something, be it art, or business, or craft, they can become a master of that thing. Ten thousand hours. That’s 4.8 years of working standard, boring 40 hour work weeks. Or 416 straight days, no food, no rest, and no sign of your quarry but what bare page can tell.
How can a writer truly quantify hours spent “writing” when the art itself involves reading, thinking, note-taking, revision, editing, doodling, coffeeing, interneting, researching, and socializing? There’s only one way I can think of: word count. Those words that are finally committed to the page, even during a first draft, are usually the result of all your extra-writing activities. In theory, if you wrote at a moderate pace of 500 words an hour, you’d have to write 5,000,000 words to reach the coveted 10,000 hour mark. Five million hand-picked, deliberate word choices, all meticulously placed and replaced, chained together to create your art.
WordPress is an awesome tool and I often sing its praises from the mountaintop in my free time. But it lacks a way to easily compile a collective word count for your entire blog, even if you export the XML and try to parse it out. So over the past few months, through painstaking reviews of each post, I collected word counts and built my own word count tracking tool:
This sheet contains all of my posts, the categories they were published in, the dates they were published, whether they were fiction or nonfiction, and the word counts for each. I plan to one day add the hits, comments, and likes for each post, but just the idea of doing that right now makes me want to go to bed and sleep through my alarm.
I recognize that this is an incredibly nerdy and boringly analytic thing to do, but it has given me a way to tangibly track my writing progress, see how far I’ve come in terms of frequency of posting and other metrics. It has shown me how many words I write on average (750.28), what time of the year I write the most (Summer), how often I post about certain topics (too often), and just how OCD I am about organizing things in my life (very). It is a lasso I’ve thrown around the charging bull of my writing, in an attempt to slow it down so I can take a closer look.
But more importantly, this spreadsheet, with all of its hard data and shiny numbers, has shown me just how much I’ve written. And how much more I have left to write. The squiggly JELL-O of my progress suddenly has some form, like it’s been sitting in the fridge all these years slowly firming, each blog post a little piece of apple or orange suspended in the green goo of my career. There are nearly 200,000 words written across the loose pages of CSS and HTML that make up this blog; 200,000 words that I spent time choosing, orienting, crafting, and typing.
200,000 is only four percent of 5,000,000. But that’s four percent in the right direction. Four percent more than I had two years ago. Four percent that feels like four hundred.
When it feels like you’re writing and writing and writing but nothing is happening, take some time to see just how much you’ve written. Think about what you’ve learned from every sentence, remember that your voice is more than just the sum of your word counts. Every single word you type puts you one five-millionth closer to mastering your style. Remember that you are making progress, one idea, one letter, one word at a time.