Writing habits

I’ve been trying to write every day since I started this Nano2015 project back on 1 April. My rule is that I’m allowed to take a day off and, if I really just can’t, two days off. More than two days of not writing is not allowed, even if on Day 3 I glower at Word for an hour and end up just writing a sentence.

I’ve been recording my progress day-by-day since July and have discovered quite a few interesting things.

Firstly, the more planning I have done about a section before I get there, the more I write per day (this one should have been obvious but it’s cool to have physical proof. I’m officially a plotter).

July’s bit was well-planned, especially the bit that I got to write mid-July (that huge spike) which was the turning point of the novel. In August I hit the doldrums and I’m actually really proud that I made it through at all considering how bleak it got. I think I spent about four weeks writing and rewriting the same section. Which brings us to…

I’ve written 174,710 words! It’s taken six months, but I’ve stuck with a single project for six months and I’ve written almost Goblet of Fire. In fact, by the time it’s done, it will probably be the size of Goblet of Fire (I am hoping I can cut it down significantly in editing). You can see the doldrums of August there quite clearly. I was writing every day but the total word count didn’t change because I got stuck in rewriting. As soon as I broke free of that, things started to climb!

New words added per month:

July: 38,515
August: 14,513
September: 23,541

For me, this is the most interesting graph:

Weekends are obviously great for writing because there’s so much extra time, but before recording my writing every day I would never ever have guessed that Thursdays were such a bad day for writing. In fact, I skipped last night as well (which wasn’t included in the sample). My average words per day: 832. My average words per day on a Thursday? 367. Ouch.

Hopefully October will be the last month of this particular project’s first draft. I’d like to try something new in November, applying the same habits and hopefully using this knowledge of my own writing process to win.

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