How To Measure Your Writing Progress When You’re “Too Wordy”
Many clients tell me they struggle with getting the words out, whether it’s time or feeling blocked.
For others, though, getting the words out isn’t the problem.
Sitting down to write isn’t the problem.
Hours at the page isn’t the problem.
Inspiration and ideas aren’t the problems.
What if you have “too many words?”
You sit down to get an idea out of your head and onto the page, an hour goes by and you have over a thousand words. Keep doing that day after day, and you’ll wind up with a big pile of words.
So how do you measure your progress when you have too many words to handle?
A word count challenge like NaNoWriMo is a breeze — you can get the words out. But what the hell do you do with all those words?
First, congratulations. I’ve worked with business owners and writers on both sides.
When word count is no biggie, you might be an internal processor. You find your flow in writing — it feels good. Maybe you’d even say you love writing.
If you love writing and feel in the flow, don’t ever worry about having too many words — I don’t think there’s such a thing.
Especially in the first draft stage, where the only goal is to get the words out of you.
How do you make sure you complete your writing project by December (or whatever your goal is)?
Here’s how to measure your writing progress when word count is a piece of cake:
Have a complete blueprint. Maybe even create this based on your natural rhythms, and break up your planning, writing, and editing time. Here’s a 4-week example:
Week 1 - Create a Writing Plan — like a seamstress who measures twice and cuts once. Invest time in the plan for your writing before you start. Create containers such as writing an SFD (shitty first draft) of a chapter per day. Block the time on your calendar, and keep those commitments.
Week 2 - Write your SFD and get the words out fast. With your writing plan there and ready, determine if you’ll work on a chapter (or a few) a week — and then write.
Week 3 - Do something else. Work another part of your brain — read more, learn something new, paint a picture, play the piano. These activities could flow into your writing.
Week 4 - Editing, revising, and trimming. Killing the darlings (a phrase I’ve never really embraced). You don’t need to kill anything — only move things to another house. Keep a scratch pile and move what you won’t use into a new Google Doc for other content like your blog or social media.
Set an intention for each writing session.
Before beginning, decide: how do you want to feel when you’re done? What do you want your reader to feel when they read it? What’s the goal of the writing — connect, convert, make a purchase? Choose your goal when you begin and then evaluate it when you’re done.Throw out the measuring sticks.
We’re often obsessed with measuring progress and success. What if you changed the metric and decided to get into a flow state at least once a day for 2 hours? At the end of a writing session, look back and ask yourself, “did I enjoy writing this?”
What do you do with all those extra words when you’re “too wordy”?
First, know that no writing is ever wasted. There are roughly 20,000 words that came out of Unfussy Life. I needed to write those words to get to the other ones. Some of the stories didn’t fit well into the sections, and I just didn’t want to share some chunks with the world. I save them in a Google Doc and look to them for blog and social media content inspiration. Maybe they’ll go into another book or a newsletter.
Remember that writing and editing are two very different activities.
You could say that getting the words out is an act of surrender, an activity with feminine qualities. And editing is an act of discernment with masculine qualities — chopping, moving, adding, taking action. Both serve to balance each other out and are necessary to post or publish any piece of writing.
There’s an intuitive quality to both. And one thing I know for sure is that when people overthink what they write and what they edit, it leads to procrastination and letting your words sit in a Google Folder for years.
Our job as creatives is to get the words out and then focus on keeping the quality ones.
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