2 Reasons to Add Up A Collective Word Count
I have a spreadsheet in my notes document that has my cumulative wordcount for all of my writing across short stories, unfinished books, and complete books. Every time I finish a book or short story, I go and add another column to show how many more words I’ve written since I started.
I do this for 2 reasons;
I am encouraged by remembering my past work. Four years ago, I would not have been able to comprehend writing as fast and as well as I do now. But it takes looking back at the old me and the old books I wrote to really remember that.
I am motivated by the future. I’ve read somewhere that it takes 1,000,000 words to be a good writer (I don’t know if that’s true, but I figure that’s a lot of good practice). I’ve made it my goal to get to a million words and knowing how far I have to go motivates me to write more often.
I started compiling such a list several weeks ago! I need to finish. It was really motivating to go back in my archives and see just how many words I had cranked out at age 14, 15, or 16 on various projects (even if they were never completed).
I am way too disorganized to keep numbers like that, but I just did the math, and I have written and published nearly 6 million words. Then my younger self used to write by hand, so all my old, faded notebooks surely add up to a few hundred thousand more. I had no idea. And yes, practice is the best way to improve. Even if you don't edit or fix what you write, just putting words on paper over and over is so helpful. You'll have to let us know when you get that first million! That's a great goal.