Contact me at lucyvictoriabrown@gmail.com because I'm always up for a natter about anything. Well, mostly.

Monday 11 April 2011

Crunching The Fourth Draft Figures

Now I've come down from the elation of actually closing the document housing my fourth draft and sending it off for a lucky someone to read, I decided to open my spreadsheet of daily totals and see how the whole endeavour panned out. Please tell me I'm not the only writer obsessed with statistics. It's a habit I picked up in my last job and, actually, all my PhD stuff is organised onto spreadsheets that do several wonderful but useless things. I like the information there, so I can berate or congratulate myself as necessary, So, let's take a look.

I started the fourth draft on 16th January and completed it on 6th April. My calculation there is that it took me 81 days.

I wrote nothing for this particular story on 31 days of the 81. That means I only really worked for 50 days on it. That makes my average word count over the days I actually wrote 1361 words.

On 27 days I wrote less than 1000 words.

On 15 days I wrote between 1000 and 2000 words.

On 3 days I wrote between 2000 and 3000 words.

On 5 days I wrote more than 3000 words.

My highest daily word count was my last (6821) and my lowest was 324 on 26th January.

Well, I have to say, I like those figures. They're not too shabby. It proves that I could complete a draft in two months if I worked everyday. It also proves that the slowly-but-surely method yields results. I didn't manage to meet my minimum target of 1000 words on more than half of my working days and yet I still completed the thing. My five 'super-spurt' days were pivotal in the success but it would only have taken me a few more weeks had I stuck to lesser amounts.

I shall now stop dwelling over the fourth draft. I'll have enough to contend with when I deal with the next one...


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