Progress Marches On

After a week and a half of starting my new goal of writing at least 200 words a day, progress is coming along nicely. My previous goal of aiming to hit the average word count per chapter seemed to hinder my writing more often than it motivated me. In hindsight, I don’t even know why I didn’t write this way in the first place.

Maybe it was just the newcomer in me to think this was a good idea at the time. In the early researching stages, more into the “how do I do this?” of writing, I looked up a lot of things such as word counts of novels I loved reading, average word count per chapter, etc. While the word count for each different novel varied for a number of reasons, the amount of average words per chapter remained fairly the same. 4000 words per chapter on average, more or less.

So that’s what I used as a target. For the first 6 chapters of my novel, (8 if you count the two I removed to hopefully make two companion novels in good time), I would strive to hit at least 4000 words and if I did, I knew I was getting somewhere. This did work for a good while but as things went on, I found myself scrambling to close the chapter off once I hit this word count. I did manage to catch myself before it became a recurring problem, but it was a problem nonetheless. I was skimping on my story in places when I felt the chapter had reached a “decent” length.

So I switched things up. When I eventually tried to give myself a deadline to finish my first draft, my date of completion is relying on the condition that I must write at least 200 words a day. Needing to change my method, I decided this wouldn’t be a bad thing to try and swap out the old method for. And I was right. Writing chapter 7 has been more of a breeze than anything I wrote before.

The word count is a smaller daily goal which also keeps me writing daily AND with the progress broken up into smaller 200+ word intervals, where I’m trying to go with my story doesn’t seem so far away. I even have been more creative, if I dare say so, with this chapter. The outline for 7 was probably the least detailed out of the whole outline for the novel but I’ve somehow managed to come up with a whole bunch of other parts to add. And I reckon it’s because of this new method.

So March may have ended, but the March of Progress continues onward (see what I did there?)