Once again, a chart like this can be useful in future planning. I don’t have to pause to think about what is going to happen next.įor folks doing NaNoWriMo this month, if you are sticking close to your daily target, you would expect to see a flat histogram, one in which your daily range is almost always falling between 1,600-1,700 words without too much variation.
I tend to write more on days when I am working on the second or third draft because I’ve already written the first draft and know where the story is going. I will guess that these days involved one of two things: either I was pushing to finish the first draft of my novel or I was writing a second or third draft of a story. I’ve written more than 2,000 words on 13 or 14 days. (In the not-too-distant future, I’ll have better data on this as I have started track the time I spend writing in addition to my daily word counts.) This reinforces what I have been saying all along: being able to write in short chunks of available time has been one of the key factors in writing every day for me. The bulk of my writing falls into the 500-600 word bucket, which is about what I write in 20-30 minutes. It looks like there are only 23 days in which I wrote between 1,300 and 1,900 words–about the word count I’d get if I wrote for an hour or slightly more. You can tell this because there is a big dropoff after 1,200+ words. What the histogram tells me is that, in the last 253 days, I rarely write for more than one hour each day.
For instance, I know that I can write about 1,500 words in one hour. Looking at the data this way allows me to infer a few interesting things about my writing habits. And on about 14 days, I wrote more than 2,000 words. On about 8 days I wrote less than 100 words. So, for instance, on about 50 days, I wrote between 500-600 words. The height of the bar represents the number of days my writing fell into that range. The last bar represents days where I wrote more than 2,000 words. The first bar represents days where I wrote less than 100 words. In case it isn’t clear how a chart like this works, each bar represents a range of word counts.
The result for the last 253 days looks like this: This morning, as I was glancing over my writing metrics, it occurred to me that an interesting chart could be produced by collecting my daily word counts (for fiction) in a histogram. As of yesterday, I have written for 251 out of the last 253 days.
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