2008: The Year of Eight Hundred Thousand Words - - Summary Extravaganza

800,737 words

My total has not moved since 20 December, but I have. I've spent Weihnachten / Christmas in Northern Germany, and now I'm in Florence for Anno Nuovo / New Years. I'll be in Rome and Cairo for my birthday (I wonder if any customs officials will wish me happy birthday?), Honduras for Waitangi Day, and probably Argentina for Easter.

I haven't arrived at any New Year's Resolutions for 2009 yet as I'm still getting over 2008's.

Which brings me to:

How I Got To 800,737 words...

From 2 January to 22 March 2008 I was ahead of target. Those were the days. The blue flatlining at the end of the year is a bit depressing / misleading. I recommend you focus more on the steepness of the section that just precedes it.

Breaking it down further...

And further still...

(Week 50 stands out, don't it?)

And further still? Okay...

It was neck and neck between Sunday and Tuesday for a long time. In the end, Sunday contributed 420 more words than it's weekday rival. I'm still shocked that Tuesday did so well. I guess it's because there's never anything to do on Tuesdays except write, and I still have a bit of energy left from the weekend without it being a Monday...

By taking out all the days I was away from home, Sunday clearly outperformed the rest (adjusted average of 2,807 words versus Tuesday's 2,619).

But it would be remiss of me not to address the fact I was aiming for 1,000,000 words and not 800,000.

As Mike LaFontaine would say, Wha' Happened?



Excuses

2008 contained no less than seven international trips, ranging from long weekends to nine day absences from my desk: Madrid, Norway, Paris, Turkey, Greece, Estonia/Latvia and now Germany/Italy (and beyond). Then there were the trips within Scotland exploring the Highlands and Hebrides, and the day trips, and the shows during festival...

The link between travel and the ever-widening gap between me and my target was summed up pretty well by this graph from back in week 39:

But travel wasn't the whole story. There were 43 goose eggs in 2008 (days when I wrote no words) - - all travel related. But if I had those 43 days again, I'd still need to write around 4,600 words a day to crack the million. The longest span over which I averaged that many words was eight days => Verdict: unlikely.

There was, of course, the dreaded day job to contend with. Or day jobs. After an extended Christmas break, I started a six-week temp job in mid-Jan. Queue first drop-off. Then, in March, I moved straight into a more difficult job. I still spent the same amount of time away from home, but I was left with much less energy in the evenings (and less time to dream up things to write about while filing...).

But travel and employment aren't really excuses. I don't regret the places I've been or the money daytime drudgery has earnt. I always knew writing had to fit in around life: the Quest For A Million Words came about as a way of shifting writing up the list of priorities (however artificially), and in that respect it was a success.

But there were other 'contributing factors' to my failure to reach one million words:

My inability to commit to, and finish, a novel-length narrative. Perhaps it was due to the pressures imposed by this scheme (which I devised to force me to finish another novel). Perhaps it was the difficulty inherent in writing a novel in evenings and weekends? (If and when I jump back on that Clydesdale, I'll look long at hard at doing it without working a day job).

Or perhaps I wasn't ready to write another novel? Perhaps I'm just not built for them?

Related to my cooling off with the novel as a form, was my increasing interest and passion for shorter forms, both in prose and poetry. Short stories yielded me my biggest success of 2008 (though my collection won't be published till 2010), and they made up the biggest chunk of my writing pie this year (see below), but I don't think I could have written much more that 300,000 words of short fiction this year, or any other year. There are only so many ideas you come up with, and only a percentage of these stand up to being put on the page, and only some of these warrant sticking with and revising...

Same goes for poetry, though it's more pronounced due to the lack of WORDS in them...

I don't regret any of the time I spent on poetry or short fiction, so I cant turn around now and say I wish I tried harder with Novel A and Novel B. They'll still be there when I'm ready.

Recipie for an 800,737 word pie

Blogging is a rather large constituent. I expended about as many words writing about my travels for friends and family on my travel blog as I did on Novel A. I probably didn't put as much care and attention into those posts as I did in my rock'n'roll novel rewrite, but when I read over some of the 'improvements' I thought I was making to the novel, I was clearly way off base. On the other hand, when I read over some of my travel blogs, I don't cringe as much as I would suspect (typos aside), and find that without churning out 2,000 words of "We did A, then went to B, then had C for dinner..." I would have forgotten some details which might one day wriggle their way into my fiction (or poetry).

The moral: travel blogs (and update-type emails, see larger green segment) contain some value and deserve to be included in the word count.

As for blogging here, sometimes it has been a postive, sometimes a negative. The weekly wordcount updates helped push me along, but sometimes it all felt a bit too public. I'm liked having a place to air my thoughts about short story competitions, or the evolution of my musical tastes, or nuwanubianism... but wonder now if there shouldn't be a cooling off period before some things get posted, and an expiry date after which some posts cease to exist.

And since this blog, with it's quest-y title and optimistic and soon-to-be-outdated url, is so 2008, I have a decision to make: continue to blog here, create a new blog (with another gimmick?), or lapse into silence...?

It's a decision I am yet to make.

For now, the Quest For A Million Words remains open. I will appear at random intervals to post photos and perhaps even anecdotes from my travels. When I have a job and a place to live back in New Zealand, and have sent of the final manuscript for my short story collection (title still to be determined), things should be clearer.

But for now, here's some photos from Germany...

March Experiment - - a 248 word story

A screaming comes across this guy.

"Call me an ambulance."

There is no blood.

"Oh! Isabella."

There is no Isabella.

We think he's crazy.

We give him our shrinks' phone numbers and offer generic antidepressants but he just keeps screaming, "Ambulance! Isabella!"

"Some people," the guy next to me says.

"C'mon," someone else says, "let's get frozen yoghurt like they do on Full House when things get too real."

So we stick our hands in our pockets and turn away from the guy, who's still shouting, "Isabella!"

"She's not coming, pal," someone says in a fake New York accent. Some of us laugh.

At the frozen yoghurt vendor the queue is long. "Lot of people," says a woman with thinning hair. I agree.

They are out of wildberry when I get to the counter.

"I wonder if that guy is still screaming?" a woman asks.

People shrug.

"I once fell in love with a beautiful woman," I tell the man with a tub of apricot beside me.

"Yeah?"

"You can probably guess what happened."

He nods. He knows.

"That Isabella must be something to behold," I say, then, "Isabella!"

People look around the frozen yoghurt vendor’s store.

"Isabella!"

"Hey, are you alright?" the guy asks.

"Oh!" is all I say.

"Oh!" groans someone behind me.

"Ohhh!"

"You've flipped," says a woman with a fleck of frozen yoghurt on her top lip.

"Isabella!" another woman cries.

Outside it is raining. A dog leashed to a lamppost begins to howl.

About the March Experiment

When pondering the affect of the extra day on my quest to write a million words in a year, I decided to see what 8 extra words a day really meant by writing a story in 8 word instalments over the month of March.

I set out with the intention to write with a blank slate each day. The first few days the idea of writing only eight words was full of possibility, and I played around with how much meaning you could pack into those words by referencing other works (see the first line of Gravity’s Rainbow, Neil Young’s ‘Ambulance Blues’) and using cliff-hanger endings (e.g. on the first day, there was an incidental reference to Blondie’s ‘Call Me (Theme from American Gigilo)’).

But after a few days, I realised I had to actually write a story, and without the ability to go back and change the foundations, I just had to forge ahead with this story of a screaming guy and sceptical onlookers.

And upon my return from Norway, I realised I had to wrap this thing up somehow.

I had to edit a bit as I went as I often slipped into past tense some days. And today I noticed when I exported the whole story into Word and did a wordcount, there were 250 words rather than 248 (31 x 8). So twice this month I screwed up the simple task of counting to eight… some accounting graduate, huh?

So I’ve gone back, identified the culprits, and massaged the text slightly so it’s 248 words.

I don’t think the story itself has much to redeem it besides the story behind the process. Like most experiments, it was more Learning Experience than Significant Achievement.

Ah well.

Time to come up with my next experiment.

I think it might have something to do with translation. Watch this space.

Status Report: Weeks Twelve and Thirteen

Based on my targets, I should be writing my 250,000th word on Tuesday 1 April.

Not likely.

[The usual slew of graphs and figures will follow, but permit me a few words to reassure myself.]

Four days in Norway put me behind the run rate for the first time, but that’s not the only reason I’m struggling at the mo.

The whole of March has, in fact, been a struggle. It’s no coincidence I started a new job at the beginning of the month, and am only now beginning to settle into a routine where I have the energy at the end of the day to write and write until I crack 3,000 words.

There’s also the general fatigue from having spent so long (91 days and counting) writing, thinking about writing, and obsessing about word counts. I would have given up long ago if it wasn’t for this blog—which is pretty much why I started it and why I mention it in all the bio notes I send to publications. I have to keep going, even if I fall horribly short, because giving up in March or May or even September looks bad to someone who googles “Craig Cliff” or “Bend Sinister Ekwilism”, or someone who reads ‘Copies’ in the Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 5 (forthcoming from Random House) and thinks, “I’d like to know more about this writer and his foolhardy quest,” -- and what they find is someone who gave up part way.

The statement at the top of this blog reveals the point of this project is not to write one million words (an arbitrary figure) but to see if it is possible. And behind all this is the fact that having a target will light the fire under me (and keep it stoked) so that I write every day, in a variety of moods, in a variety of styles (and with varying degrees of success).

I am soliloquising here. Permit me this To Write Or Not To Write moment.

It is okay to flail in 2008. To fall behind what is, I now know, a hellish pace for someone with a day job and a continent to explore, is sub-optimal, but it’s okay. My bio notes in 2009 can read: In 2008 Craig Cliff tried to write one million words, but only managed 850,633. If I give up now, there’s no way I’m going to mention a three month spurt where I wrote 238,697words.

This is not to say that I have resigned myself to falling short. I know that if I ever get the engine built for Novel B and place it on the tracks, I could crank out four to five thousand words a day. I also know that, thanks to my visa situation, there will be a month or two in the second half of the year where I will not be working. I’ll probably travel some, but I’ve learnt the value of a free day since late January, and I could make up some serious ground.

This quarter-quest crisis has helped to crystallise my real goals for the year. As mentioned above, the million words was a means to achieve other ends, though I wasn’t sure which ends I wanted to write when I devised the plan. I’ve shelved Novel A, but I have Novel B which is a total bitch to write at the moment, but I believe its worth the grief. I also think I can get a book of short stories together by the end of the year, with some serious revising, culling, and two or three new stories which strike me down in the middle of running a macro at work and appear magically a fortnight later in my “Short Story Collection” spreadsheet with the word “Completed” in the status column and highlighted yellow for inclusion in my collection (which I am calling Copies for now).

And who knows, maybe the seeds for Novel C are already sown…

Week Twelve and Thirteen – The Stats

Fortnightly word count: 25,280

Average: 1,806 words per day (compared to 2,417 in week eleven)

Most productive day: Tuesday 25 March, 3,576 words

Least productive day: Sat 22 and Sun 23 March, 8 words (noted in my journal for 8x31 story… to be completed tomorrow)

Year-to-date: 238,697

I'm back

Four days away from the computer has done wonders for the ol' motivation, but took a whack at the word counts. The buffer is now a deficit, meaning I am behind the eight ball for the first time this year. Just like how expensive every thing is in Norway, the best way to deal with this word count situation is not to think about it.

For this reason (and my own laziness) I'm going to roll the status report for weeks twelve and thirteen into one so you'll have to wait till Sunday to see how bad it really is (was).

For now, here's a holiday snap from Norway.

Bonus Day 2008

Today is the 29th of February.

For my next door neighbour growing up, this means it’s her first birthday since 2004.

For guys this means 'Watch out, your girlfriend could propose.'

For me it means, 'Write.' After all, these extra twenty-four hours, wedged into what has always seemed to me an unfairly shortened month, are the reason I am shooting for an average of 2732 words per day rather than 2740 words. (My cavalier rounding is a bit misleading: technically, the difference is 7.4855902 words, but let's just call it eight). What is eight words? Twice that last sentence. Or: the sum of the previous two sentences. Nothing, right?

If there's anything two months of regular writing—and running along side that: regular word-counting—has taught me, it's words accumulate best when you are writing for some other purpose. Writing to get an idea down on paper. Writing to finish a story to submit for a competition. Writing an email in response to a 'How's Things' from someone on the underside of the world.

Writing for the sake of word counts is not cool.

But there are only so many deadlines, and fresh ideas and surprise emails. Most days, it's a slog to 2732. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week I made it to 2185, 2180 and 2020 words. That’s a pretty tight cluster and a long way from target. Over these three days I worked on an average of 3 different short stories per day, adding as little as 135 words each time. While mired in these piecemeal compositions, it feels like I'm going nowhere (in three separate races). But when I stop and look at my spreadsheet on special days like this, there is movement. Overall, I tacked 4,100 words onto five different works in progress in those three days, bringing one to completion (and I finished another today).

But there is still the concern that too many of these words are bad words. That entire stories should never see the light of day. That this whole venture is doing more harm than good (to my sanity, to my writing, to my posture).

Meh. I don’t like the Craig who talks like that.

To prove to myself and to the YoaMW regulars (though nothing is called regular anymore; maybe you should be called my Extra Larges?) that 8 words a day means something, I am going to write a story 8 words at a time, with one instalment for every day of March. This will produce a 248 word story. I'm going to run it along my the top of the blog. Since it's still February, I have no idea what the story will be. That will have to come tomorrow.

The Rules

As I was making the above graph, I realised that it might be a leap year in 2008, meaning I would have a bonus day. The calendar confirmed this. Yes! I thought. Then I calculated the difference this would make to me on a daily basis, and it only lowered my daily word count target by 8 words. The moral of the story is that I'm going to have to chip away at this Everest everyday.

Anyway, here's the basic rules:

(*) Daily word count consists of words written for the purposes of fiction (prose or poetry) and selected non-fiction, in a format such that a word count can be electronically calculated (e.g. typed in Microsoft Word).

(*) Applicable non-fiction is anything written during a day using full sentences and involving original thought.

(*) Word count for revision is calculated as the difference between the word count of the piece before and after the revision session. The result will always be considered a positive addition to my overall word tally.

I’ve been writing a few short stories lately, and since I came up with this million words a year idea, I’ve been keeping an eye on how much fiction I write on a daily basis. On my good days, I crack the magical 2732 word count, but this is what I would have to write each and every day in 2008 to reach my one millionth word (probably at 11:59pm on New Years Eve, heaven forbid). This is why I’ve broadened the scope to capture non-fiction involving original thought. This way, I can write essays and reviews and long, confessional emails if I’m running low on words on a particular day. I believe this is just as useful as plugging away at fiction. A lot of my story ideas come from times when I've been forced to put life into words, not merely from life itself.

As for revision, it’s the real wrinkle in this scheme. An hour spent revising a story is often more useful that an hour spent writing a first draft, but the net effect in word count terms is minimal (sometimes negative) when revising. Going after the one million wildly for 12 months could result in a mass of unedited first drafts that are still a long way from publication. (Also, I doubt I could have enough ideas to fill 300-odd 3000 word stories in the one calendar year). I could have calculated an average words per hour rate achieved when writing fiction, then multiplied the hours spent revising on a given day by this average hourly word rate to get an relative word count… but this would not be real. At the end of the year, I would have to asterisk my word count with a breakdown of real words and imaginary ones. Whatever the flaws, I’ve chosen to take the net effect on word count as a revision session’s contribution to my tally, (but I’ll use the absolute value of the net effect to make sure I don’t get to precious about cutting the fat).

This all sounds very dry at this stage. Once January rolls around, I'm sure there'll be daily-word-count-boosting oddities to grace this page.

My final word for now: I know this is a gimmick. But if it makes me write everyday, regardless of mood or circumstances, it's the gimmick for me.

(By the way, the above was 561 words.)