I’m working on a story for grades 3-6 and I was tracking my word-count-to-time-invested progress. By which I mean, I was writing and getting mad that an hour in, I was only at 225 words.
Then I had to remind myself of a few things
- There is no standard pacing when it comes to writing. Some days, the scene takes 10 minutes, some days it takes 10 hours.
- Writing shorter stories is an intense endeavour. As authors, we only have 5,000-7,000 words which means every word and action and thought has to count, which means there’s a lot of times we’re staring at the screen, trying to sort if we *really* need to say this thing or if we can skip it.
- There’s research in this story, so it’s not as though I’m solely writing. During the hour, I was also tracking down the information I needed, which eats time.
I find I can get so myopic with my writing”why isn’t it going faster/smoother/better. I’m glad I stopped today to ask myself what I was *really* doing, because it gave me a chance to see that even though the output may not look like much, there was a lot of input invested.
