I've steadily been decreasing my annual word count goal over the years, sometimes by a lot, but I still haven't been meeting my goal. Part of this is that my word count goal is my second, and more optional metric for what I track with regards to my writing goals. My primary goal is my Get Your Words Out Habit Goal, which generally works much better for me in several ways. A main reason it hasn't been working well for me is that, in any given year, I do a lot of writing that I don't consider "countable" words, for a variety of reasons. Another factor is that, over time, I have developed slightly more guidelines, stretch goals, and contingency plans for writing habit goal than I have for my wordcount goal. And another reason why it isn't working out well for me that goes along with the first is that I haven't been planning my wordcount goal for the way that I actually write. I've tried to, in increasing more accurate ways. I've factored some elements in (like removing whole months worth of writing as a goal, due to accounting for disability and regular life stuff), and I've also adjusted over time as it became clear I still wasn't meeting my goals. If I meet my word count goal this year, it won't be because I planned well for it. So, I've decided that I need to rethink how I do the math, and also adjust my goal for next year.
First, I want to write a little about the solution I've found for my writing habit goal that seems to work fairly reliably for me. First, I stick with the 120 day goal, which is also the smallest goal. If there were a shorter goal of about 80-90 days, I would choose that if I suspected I was going to have a bad or busy year, but that GYWO goal doesn't exist officially, at least not as of this writing. Second, I try to write as much during the beginning of the year as I can -- taking advantage of both the "New Year's energy" momentum and also of the quiet part of the year where I live (it is right after the winter holidays with a good break before many big national or secular holidays that tend to disrupt routine or create gatherings, there also aren't an overabundance of Pagan holidays at that part of the year, it's dark most of the day, it's also often cold and/snowy, and I am fortunate in that I don't know many people with birthdays or other significant milestones during that part of the year. This all usually combines to give me a stretch of a few months where I can write well above my habit goal, and try to build as much of a "buffer" for low months as I can. Similarly, I often try to do the same thing each month, but it is less consistently successful. That's too be expected. Life happens, and that kind of momentum can be hard to keep up, anyway, especially as the year wears on. I have a minimum of writing at least ten days each month that I try to write on. I don't always succeed, but it's the plan. It's also the goal for habit level I chose. However, if I miss days, I go under my quota, which makes me feel panicked and overwhelmed. Also, if I miss too many days, I eventually hit a point where it is no longer technically possible to meet my goal, which makes me feel frustrated and unmotivated. So to avoid that, and to add more days to the buffer for the sometimes inevitable months when I don't meet my goal, I set myself stretch goals. While I technically have met my quota for the month after writing on ten days, I try not to consider myself "done" for the month until I have written twelve or fifteen days. Sometimes I have a really good month and get twenty or even more days. Some days I can write for eleven days, which is still more than ten, so still building a surplus, but not technically meeting my stretch goals. Ideally I want to have enough extra days built up that I can miss whole months if I have to without falling behind -- because sometimes missing whole months is exactly what I have to do. I believe I worked it out previously that if I write at least twelve days each month, I will meet my goal in October, and if I write at least fifteen days each month, I will meet my goal in August. I relax after I meet my goal to varying degrees, but I still try to write between ten to fifteen days each month after I meet my goal. Sometimes I don't succeed, but usually I do, and sometimes I write more -- occasionally I try to see what the highest number of days I've written in the year can get up to by trying to write on as many more days in the year as possible. Having these goals help me maintain goals, consistency, all throughout the year, including after I've met my goal, without making me feel overly stressed or overwhelmed before I meet my goal, nor unmotivated afterwards. I haven't always had such a detailed plan. I always chose the 120 days goal, though I almost chose the 240 goal a couple of times. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't. I've been doing GYWO since 2018, and I believe I have met or exceeded my goal every year except for the first year I tried it. But I didn't come up with the more detailed aspects of my plan all at once, it developed organically over time. And my progress mostly steadily improved over time. That's what I'd like to do with my word count goal, too.
I've been trying to meet a word count goal every year that I've done GYWO, too, and sometimes other years before that. I think I only met my annual goal once or twice, several years before I started participating in GYWO, and it was an anomaly that I wrote so much then.
I think the first year, I may have picked an arbitrary number that sounded good for a word count goal, or maybe attempted the lowest GYWO word count goal, but I don't remember for sure. However, most years that I've been doing GYWO, I've followed a loose formula for figuring out my word count goal for the year. I pick word count goals for both CampNaNoWriMos, NaNoWriMo, and sometimes also the 3 Day Novel Contest. I subtract a number of days that I assume I won't write on, due to disability or other reasons, even if it's just errands. Then, for the rest of the days in the year that are left over, I plan on writing one hundred words a day on each of them. I got the number from the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott, in a portion where she suggests writing one hundred words a day because it feels small and manageable, and you can often write more from there (I am paraphrasing heavily from a book that I love, but which I have not read in years). Then I added the total number of words from the total number of days assigned one hundred words, and added in the total number of words from the Camp/NaNoWriMos and 3 Day Novel contest, and that was my total word count goal for the year. As time has gone on, and I've consistently not come anywhere near meeting my goals, I've repeatedly lowered my annual word count goal, sometimes by quite a bit at one time. I've lowered my word count goals for the Camp/NaNoWriMos, and for the 3 Day Novel contest, sometimes even leaving out a count for the 3 Day Novel Contest. I've also added significantly more days each year that are allocated as "off days" on which I don't plan to write countable words. And it's helped, in that it got usually got me closer to my goal, and made the whole thing seem incrementally more achievable.
But it keeps failing because that isn't how I write. First of all, while by this point, it assumes months worth of "off" time, it also assumes that I'll write one hundred words a day, every day, in every month that I do write. Even if I wrote twenty days every month -- which I usually don't do -- it would still give me months "off" for my GYWO habit goal. The way I have it set up now also assumes that I write countable words on about the same number of days, or even more days as the number of days I write or work on writing (which is the habit goal criteria) for. And that just isn't the case. Part of why I prefer the habit goal as my main goal is that it lets me do all sorts of writing work that can still count, but that either isn't what I consider "countable" words, or that isn't technically actual writing at all. And I both write, or work on writing, many more days than the number of days on which I write countable words.
Some examples of writing related tasks I do or want to do, that aren't what I consider countable words, and some of which aren't technically writing at all, but which I either usually or always count towards my habit goal achievement for the year are: typing up what I've written (since I almost always write better by hand), saving and backing up what I've written, editing, formatting, searching for places I think will be good fits for me to submit to, tracking and logging submissions, submission markets and submission windows or deadlines, researching publications, researching for stories, writing and editing cover letters, queries, author statements, and biographical statements.
Some of what I write is also something I consider to be writing for the purposes of my habit goal, but also either not what I consider countable words, or else something that I sometimes or always don't count words for, even though they technically should count. Examples are my journal entries, which I write more than anything else, and which I definitely count, even though it was explicitly recommended not to count them when I first joined (the guidelines have since gotten more amorphous, which I appreciate. Journaling helps me process things and navigate life, which also helps me be able to do creative writing. Things often go downhill very quickly when I go too long without journalling, and often, if I haven't journaled, the things I have not processed or gotten out of my head create a kind of dam, gumming up my creative writing. It also gives me a writing task I can often do on days when creative writing or more administrative tasks seem out of reach. I also often don't count the words I write when I write poetry or songs, though probably I should, and I do definitely count them as having written that day for my habit goal. I also don't count word counts for letters, though I do count them as writing -- I write letters to pen pals, sometimes my partner, a deceased family member, sometimes to friends or politicians, and I sometimes write letters I don't intend to send to people who have annoyed or hurt me, or (usually as the result of a prompt) occasionally letters to myself. I go back and forth on blog posts and fan fiction. I'm more likely to count words on a blog post on other blogs intended for public consumption, and less likely to on this blog which I write mostly for my own writing management purposes, but neither is universal. I don't usually count words for fanfiction, because I write it purely for myself and sometimes my partner, but occasionally, I count the words depending on how much I've written, my mood, and sometimes other factors, like how long it's been since I've written. I also almost always count writing prompts as writing, but I don't usually count the words I write in them unless either the prompt itself requires a certain number of words, or unless it seems to me like it could eventually become something fit for publication. In fact, some writing prompts (I'm thinking of some of those in The Right to Write by Julia Cameron) don't even technically involve writing at all. I do usually consider all of the above as counting towards my GYWO habit, though. And then there is writing I do that is technically writing, but that I nether count towards my habit goal, nor towards my word count goal, but which often impacts my ability to do anything I actually consider writing that days or sometimes on following days, too -- for instance taking lots of notes for a virtual class, conference, or workshop, or recapping a long dream in detail in my dream journal. I usually consider non-writing-prompt related exercises from books the same way.
And then there is the fact that some writing that I would normally count words for, I sometimes simply forget or don't have time or energy, or I get overwhelmed at the thought of counting right then, particularly if I've written a lot. My brain often won't let me estimate the number of words I've written either at all, or at least until I have a baseline count of a at least a couple pages for how many words I'm fitting onto a page that day, which can be exhausting, but I also like having pretty close accuracy. Writing that I normally do count my words for includes all genres of fiction (including speculative), memoir, essays, articles, and other types of nonfiction. As I mentioned earlier, I sometimes count words in blog posts, and I usually don't in poems, but sometimes I do. Occasionally, but not always, I count words in the fan fiction I write.
For next year, I am planning on calculating and setting my word count goal this way instead, to make it more manageable and to align better with how I actually write:
Set a goal of writing at least 400 countable words per month, except for the CampNaNoWriMos and NaNoWriMo months, which brings the goal to: 3,600 words. That also means that, out of ten to twenty or more days of writing each month, if I continue to follow the advice in Bird by Bird about one hundred words a day (and I'd like to), I only have to write countable words four days each month, which seems doable.
Set a goal of writing at least 3,000 words during April's CampNaNoWriMo, at least 2,0000 words during July's, and at least 1,000 during regular CampNaNoWriMo (arranged in descending order from the one I usually do best in to the one I usually do poorest in -- though 3,000 words may be ambitious for April). That brings to total up to 9,600.
I'm debating:
Adding 1,000 or 2,000 words for the 3 Day Novel contest. I want to, but I can't afford to enter every year, and sometimes am too ill or busy to participate. And if I can't that adds a whole other thousand or two words in the later part of the year, so I don't think I will right now.
Adding either 400 additional words to bring it up to a whole 10,000, or possibly 3,400 to bring it up to a full 12,000. I might do the former, but I think that the latter is too much.
I think maybe what I will do is add 400 additional words for the 3 Day Novel contest. That way, if I can't participate, I only need to write 400 words that weekend. And if I can't write 400 words that weekend, I still only have to write an extra unallocated-for 400 words in the rest of the year. That's only four more days of writing. But it should also be relatively easier because, when I do write what i consider to be countable words, I almost always write a few hundred or more words a day.
So I think that settles it, for now, at least, anyway. My word count goal for next year will tentatively be to write at least 10,000 words, using the math above. That's 2,300 less than my goal this year, and much more in line with how I actually write, so I hope it works. It's also, total, on once of the low ends for a single short story and a medium end for an essay, which makes it seem less intimidating.
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