Does the month ever jump by you, sprinting madly to the finish, leaving you in a whirlwind, making you think, what happened and why? That was June for me.
Packed in with the end of school, summer school for the oldest two, planning/supporting two summer sessions for grad students, and a family trip to Gatlinburg, June was a full month that flew in two blinks of an eye.
Monthly Progress: Words written in June and for 2023
As a lover of all things data and tracking (looking at you project management role), I’ve applied tracking to my writing to see how much I’ve written and the results do I get as a result of that time. Below are the stats inside of my writing tracker for June.
That means in just one month, I’ve written almost a quarter of the words I wrote all year, where I spent over 30 hours writing, split over 51 different writing sessions. Break out the woohoo dance.
I’m not able to say that I would have been able to do this all along. Over the year, I’ve worked on prompts, studied elements of writing, and have been focusing on my consistency, focus, and discipline in writing.
Six changes that have helped:
Joining more live writing meet-ups
I’ve been joining the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Meetups and the hourly ones from the London Writer’s Salon. WFWA’s comes with your yearly membership of ~$48 and are hosted at least twice during the work week and once on Saturday and Sunday. For LWS, it’s hosted four times a day during the work week at 8 am in various time zones.
That’s helped tremendously with accountability and blocking the time for writing to be done. As a (hopefully one day former) people-pleaser, showing up for other people works for me. Seeing their little cubes on the screen lets me know they’re working, too, and so should I. It really helps quiet the critical voice in my brain and lets the character’s voice come through instead.
Continuing to write with friends
Every weekend, I meet with my writing crew (sometimes writing one), where we check in on progress for the week, goals, new books to read, and skill mastery. Last week, we read The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill and were working our way through Intitutive Editing by Tiffany Yatess Martin, the editor to the stars (at least to me anyway), who I came across through Camille Pagan and her various writing workshops/supports.
Anyway, all of it’s in service of our craft. We typically spend Saturday mornings at 8 my time in the social part and try to get at least 1 25-minute sprint in. Sundays, we spent the majority of the time sprinting in 25-minute chunks.
In addition to that, I have two other writing besties (who I adore) who we write together and support each other through deadlines. Lucky me, I get to jump into sprints with my Phoenix friend later today and tomorrow.
Setting floor and ceiling goals
See AlsoThe clichés of life.My ideal minimum word count is 1250 words a day. If a page is 250 words, if I do that 5 times, that’s five pages of manuscript written. I put the stop at 2500, knowing that whenever I go over that number, my brain is fried the next day. The good thing is that I also know I can build to a higher number as I have built to the 1,250, but have to be mindful of the other roles I play as a full-time advisor, wife, and mom to three kids 8 and under.
One tip I picked up later in the month was the goal of writing at least 100 minutes a day after listening to a talk by Alex Hormozi. In the talk, he named that you couldn’t help but be great if you did a thing 100 minutes a day or 100 times. I took it on as a challenge but with the caveat that if you’re not operating from a plan/strategy, then you could be spending the time and have not much to show for it.
I’m happy to report I can now hit that number pretty reliably within an hour and twenty minutes a day. I could go on and on about this, and probably will in a later post :)
Simplified my outline structure tool
In early June, I had convinced myself that what my work needed was a template. Yes, that would be the key. A template breaking down the action of every chapter and what the chapters needed to feel. Templates make my brain productive, you see. So I went down the rabbit hole of typing all this out, only to basically paste it under the body text. It not only bloated my word count, but I knew, as I did from the start (self-awareness, what can I say) that this was another method of procrastination and helping me to avoid the hard work of just writing the book.
Once I started to be honest with myself and just do the work, the words came, and they were good words that served the story. At the end of the day, I just have to do that same thing over and over and tell the story as it was planned (with minor adjustments for whatever hell the characters want to do).
The game changer: Chunking meetings into 25-minute sprints.
Even though most of my Zoom write-ins are 50 minutes or an hour and a half, using a visual youtube timer has been helping me stay focused on the time and what I need to do.
The real game changer: A hard ass deadline
I’m due to finish this manuscript by July 31st. There’s quite a bit to do, not even mentioning the edits for my editor, but I believe that working on my mindset, habits, and productivity has been helpful for me as I draft forward. I’m not overwhelmed by the words this time because it’s just story and math. I literally listen in on my character’s conversation and transcribe. If I do that accurately enough and for long enough, I’ll hit those word/story goals and then some.
Goals for next month:
Submitting manuscript on time
Finding the balance between kids, the book, and work
Making sure to enjoy this thing called life.
That’s all I’ve got. What things have been helpful in increasing your word count? Let me know in the comments.
Best -
Bri
