Why word count goals can be bad for you

After writing my post “What happens if you can’t do goals?” the comments hit a nerve. I realized that writing had lost some of its fun for me. This was a very subtle change, so much so I hadn’t noticed it until Peggy brought it up.

I think it’ll be a theme for 2024, because I want to find that fun again. That starts with exploring why it faded. One of the reasons was word count goals.

Word count goals can work  for some types of people (High Achiever or Focus on the Clifton Strengths, for example). That doesn’t automatically mean they work for every person.

So…

Everything about writing falls into two camps:

Writer experts explaining the rulesWriter experts explaining word count goals, process, and marketing

The first is for the beginners, and it’s a huge industry. The writer expert just has to hit the right emotional notes and beginners will flock to their site and spend money. These experts will offer one or two-hour seminars on a very broad topic, priced for beginners (who are notoriously cheap). One Writer’s Digest 100 sells outline software, and another sells a school. Many offer developmental editing services. Everyone does affiliated links.

The second category shows up in indie publishing primarily. The experts here differ from the ones for beginners. They will be actively writing and have produced a lot of books. Some are New York Times best-selling writers.

These writers flock to a small group of writing experts. The writers give advice on productivity, usually on how to write more words. This can include:

Establish a daily word count, or a weekly quota. Harvey Stanbrough calls it “The Invaluable Daily Word Count Goal.”
Create a sprint to build momentum (the logic being that you won’t want to break the sprint). Dean Wesley Smith has an ongoing sprint of writing every day for his blog, even writing through a shattered shoulder, surgery to replace it, and recovery.
Using pockets of “wasted” time to get more words (like when you’re standing in line at the grocery store). Recommended by Michael La Ronn
Using dictation because we speak faster than we type
Outline your story/Don’t outline your story, depending on the writer. There’s a book on how to write 10K in a day, for example (by the way, that number is a total fantasy if you work full time. You need 10-12 hours at least to write that much in a day).
Track your words in a spreadsheet or on a calendar
Post your word count on your blog regularly. This was popularized by Dean Wesley Smith as part of his sprint, and Harvey Stanbrough also did it for a while.

There’s even an app that’ll plan all this out for you and give you pretty charts to show your progress. What on earth would you do with something like this? It’s not like you’re briefing leadership. But that’s also my opinion, and I know there are some who would find this motivating.

Data like this is very appealing. Businesses love data and metrics. PowerPoint presentations are filled with bar charts, pie charts, and line charts.

Businesses also don’t like creatives, or thinkers. What we do can’t be measured, as Peggy noted in the comments from the posts on goals. Our creative process does many other things besides apply black marks to a computer screen. Other tasks that are writing-related and important to the process include research, outlining, revision, cycling, proofreading, and copyediting. But not one of those can be measured, other than with time.

So the metric we end up with is word count and anything that doesn’t fit that metric is ignored. We’re told that the ideal number is 1,000 words an hour. When National Novel Writing pops up in November, that number is 1,667 a day to get 50K in a month. Dean Wesley Smith is running a year long challenge where you have to write 2,024 words a day, every day for an entire year.

I’ve also had experiences elsewhere where the metrics disconnected me from what should have been something normal and a non-issue:

Google Fit and 10,000 steps: I tried this originally because of Noom (which had its own issues). Initially, it was fun getting to 10K steps because I didn’t think I could do it and I did. One day though, I was scrambling in the evening to grab my last 3K to make the 10K…. and I suddenly asked myself, “Why am I doing this?” It wasn’t fun; I was merely checking the box Google Fit told me to do. I turned off the app and said good riddance. People have been so obsessed with making step count that they will march in place in a room after having surgery. Can you imagine freaking out over your word count goal and trying to make it on your cell phone because the power went out? Yikes.

Sleep Apps: This started for me because I disliked having an alarm clock blare me awake. At the time, sunrise clocks were quite expensive, so Sleep Cycle was an ideal solution. It has gentle wake-up music that’s not disruptive. It also tracks my sleep, and it’s really inaccurate. It’ll say I slept 6 hours, but when I look at the data, it’s clearly 7 hours. But seeing the data made me think I was sleeping poorly. I couldn’t understand why nothing improved my sleep, so I purchased an Oura ring because it was supposed to be the best app. That lasted about four months. It did show me I needed to buy a new mattress (#8 Deliberative then stepped in. I wanted to save up for it, and Deliberative immediately spent the money). But Oura wasn’t accurate either. Worse, it would flag “problems.” I’d get a flag that my temperature had gone down late during the night so I should “pay attention”–in bolded red. Or my resting heart rate didn’t go down until late that night, so I should “pay attention.” Or that I got 5 hours and 23 minutes of sleep (possibly inaccurate) so I should “Pay attention.” It became apparent that the apps were the problem, telling me I didn’t get enough sleep when maybe I had. Can you imagine using a word count tracker app or a spreadsheet where if you don’t meet your word count for the day, it turns red or tells you to pay attention?

This is what word count quotas can lead to. At one point, I used a book about writing a book in 30 days (it’s the one with the orange cover). I dutifully targeted 1,667 words a day. I didn’t feel I could cycle as I needed to, or think, for that matter (which Intellection needs) because I had to meet the daily word count or I would fall behind. I couldn’t even miss a day because if I did, I would fall behind. That meant I wrote on some days where I was dog tired (read: it felt like I was punishing myself to get the word count goal). By the time I felt like I was getting near the end, I could plainly see a problem: I was writing words to get to the word count, not paying attention to the story. So I called the story done. How much of that did I use? None.

Jennifer Brinn notes that word count goals are binary. Did you complete your goal? Yes or no. Dean Wesley Smith, in his early blog sprint, said that the number of words you wrote didn’t matter (this, while blogging about the number of words he wrote and providing an accumulated total for the year). You were supposed to feel like you accomplished something even if you didn’t meet the goal and that not reaching it wasn’t a failure. Easy for him. Not easy for most people.

Picture being in school and taking a test. If you get a certain number of answers wrong you fail the test, right? I once skipped one answer on a Scantron test and got 17 questions wrong, It was demoralizing.

Numbers do count and can have an emotional hit. If word count goals work fine for you, great. Continue what you’re doing. If they don’t work for you, question it when someone tells you this is the way to do it.

Frankly, we need more of that.

Next up, I’m going to tackle a big sacred cow: Heinlein’s Rules.