Keeping track of my writing life

In the new year I plan to keep better track of my writing times, which I hope will push me to be more productive. So even if it does take me 20 hours to finish a short story, I'm optimistic this tracking will help me be write more fiction in 2010 than in 2009.

As such, here are my writing times for the first week of 2010:

• Time spent on new short story writing: 4 hours
• Time spent revising and editing short stories: 4.5 hours
• Time spent preparing one short story submission: .5 hour
• Time spent on my novel: 0
• Time spent on communications with editors/fellow writers: 1 hour
• Time spent on Facebook/Twitter/Blog: 3 hours
• Time spent reading the news and doing other stuff online: 5 hours

I'm not satisfied with those numbers, and aim to lower the amount of time reading the news online and increase the amount of time writing. While I work a full-time job in addition to my writing, if I have 8 hours to spend online (not all of which is goofing off, but a good part is) there is definitely more time in my life to devote to writing.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of my writing times last year, so I can't make a good comparison to what I want to accomplish this year. However, based on my Duotrope Digest submission tracking numbers, I wrote 8 new short stories in 2009, of which 5 were accepted and published (mostly in Interzone). I also wrote a large chunk of a novel.

My goals for 2010 are to write fewer short stories but to complete my current novel and finish the rough draft of a second. I'll be giving weekly updates on the status of these projects as a way to keep me honest and productive. So feel free to call me nasty names if I slack off over the next 12 months.

Comments

[Cate Gardner]

I should do this if only to give myself a shock when I discover how much time I waste online.

[Jason Sanford]

That's one of the reasons I did it. I was shocked at how much time I spent online over the last week. The test, though, will be seeing how much time I spend online in the coming week!

[Dylan Fox]

Jason, when you write, do you just sit down and write with the occasional break for more coffee or feed the cat? I seem to spend a few minutes every half-hour or so when writing online, checking emails or lolcats or whatever. I'm sure it puts a huge dent in my productivity, but if I don't do it I end up staring at a flashing cursor and wishing I'd taken a job in the city. Guess I'm just kind of curious if those four hours are four hours pretty solid writing, or four hours when writing is doing most of the time, but also a little bit of time for goofing off.

[Jason Sanford]

That's approximately four hours of solid writing. When I write, I tend to write for a solid hour or two with minimum interruptions. I'll then break, do whatever else needs to be taken care of, and return to the writing. My tally above doesn't include these breaks.

When I edit and revise stories--which tends to take up more time than the original writing--I do as you describe, allowing other things to interrupt or distract me. For this tracking, I try to only include the amount of time I'm actually editing and revising a story.

[Cherie Thibodeaux]

I love the accounting. I have a program on my iPhone for keeping track of time, but I lack the fortitude to publish the results.

I hope you meet your goals. It will be fun to see if you do.

Good luck!

[T.W. Anderson]

I generally do freelance contracts for 4-5 hours a day, spend 2-3 hours reading through submissions for the zine, and hopefully fit in 2 hours of personal writing every day. Sometimes it's hard to do that when I've had a long day of working on contracts for other clients...which is partly why I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for my freelance work...cuts down on the physical typing :) Still write my fiction by hand, though.

I'm still fairly new to this whole writing lifestyle (2 years now), and most of my experience is with travel writing and content/ghost writing, which is a little different from fiction work. However, if I had to track my fiction work for 2009 I think I pushed around 100k words of original content. I wrote 3 short stories and an 80k chunk of a fantasy novel. I also re-wrote 5 other short stories which were written before I launched my writing career. I also started 2 others. Sold 2 last year, plus did some contract science fiction, which though different, is still content. I had an outline, but it was only rough.

Tracking numbers is good, because it can help motivate you. I actually have a different tracking project going on that is related to content writing, not fiction, but the numbers are interesting. As far as fiction goes my plans for 2010 are fairly progressive. Last year (2009) was my first year of really getting my feet underneath me. Made a couple small sales, and really made some serious headway with my freelance career (to the point I'm booked solid with contracts for the next few months).

What I tried to do in 2009 was write a minimum of 1,000 words a day, 5 days a week, on my fiction. I held true to that from January until June, at which point I was swamped with contracts and just didn't have time to work on fiction. I barely did any fiction from July to November, although I found time in December to revise two previous short stories I had pulled from submission and get them back in rotation. As of now I have 4 stories in submission, 2 that are being worked on (first drafts), and I have ideas for 4 more. My goal for 2010 is to finish the 6 new stories and get all ten of them in submission rotation by the end of the year. I would also love to get past the 100k mark of my fantasy novel, but finding time is difficult because of current contracts.

Ultimately I'd love to write fiction full-time. However, my freelance writing is rocketing off in leaps and bounds and despite how much I love writing fiction, I also love money. I have a very Sir Laurence Olivier relationship with freelance writing/fiction writing at the moment...I do one for the money (he did film for cash, I do freelance for cash) and one for my soul (he did theater for the passion).

I think your numbers are fairly accurate for someone working a full-time job outside of writing. If you can average just two hours a day on your fiction you can get in anywhere from 10-14 hours (depending on if you work 5 days a week or 7 days a week) in. I'm trying really hard to keep those numbers, but it doesn't always work out.

I'll be keen on keeping tabs and comparing notes :) Good luck!

[Jason Sanford]

T.W.: Two hours a day of actual writing is indeed my goal. In that time, I can write at least 1000 words, and maybe more. Unfortunately, I'm off to a rough start on the week but we'll see how today goes.

Thanks for the insightful comment.

[Jeff Crook]

Our thoughts are in harmony. News reading, blogging and commenting gets me so tweaked I can't concentrate when I'm writing, so this year I'm cutting way back. Or plan to. So far, no luck.

Even so, last year I wrote one novel, rewrote two, and started a third. No idea how many short stories I wrote - maybe five. I could triple that if I didn't waste so much time informing myself of political events over which I have zero ability to affect, much less change.