One of the first things that most professional writers, or even just experienced writers will tell amateurs is to hold yourself accountable. You don’t know how well you’re doing unless you have some means of measuring it objectively. That’s why most recommend a word count tracker for whatever project you’re working on and I’m going to tell you the same thing. If you want to improve, if you want to produce work, you need to know how  you’re doing. Track your words.

Books, as should be painfully obvious, are made up of words. Your typical adult novel runs around 80-100k words, although that could be more or less depending on the genre that you’re working in. Therefore, if you want to write a novel, or even a short story, you need to produce words. If you don’t, you will fail. It is important to write nearly every day and keep a regular schedule. Your brain operates best with regularity. Don’t make excuses not to sit down and write. Do it and hold yourself personally accountable for producing work. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.

I’ve only been tracking my own word counts for about 2 years, although I really regret not doing it for longer. I made a New Year’s Resolution to get 6-7 books a year in the can and the only way I was able to achieve that was by tracking my words and pushing myself. My first goal, honestly pulled out of the blue, was 2k a day. It was something that I figured I could hit and could be used to test my output. I would always hit my goal and more often than not exceed it, but I wouldn’t allow myself to miss my daily word count. That’s really the secret, you have to be culpable for whatever goal you set and that comes entirely from within. Nobody is looking over your shoulder, ready to rap you on the knuckles for not following through. If you’re not willing or capable of doing that for  yourself, you  are going to run into problems, not just in writing but in life. Personal accountability is a massively important characteristic for any writer. You need to get the work done without making excuses or procrastinating.

So I created a tracker for each project in Excel. It gives a space for my daily word count, which gets tallied for each month. It also provides a place for every chapter in my book so I can record finished word counts as I write. My dailies and my overall chapter counts must match and if they don’t, as sometimes Scrivener isn’t quite that accurate, my daily counts get increased or reduced to match the actual number of words in the book. I track only what I call “finished words,” or those words that will actually, in theory, wind up in the finished book. If I’m writing character notes or story ideas or whatever else, that doesn’t get counted. It’s only words on the finished page. It stops me from messing around just to get to my goal.

I also have a countdown timer that tracks how many days, in theory, it will take me to get to 80k, based on my daily goals. I picked 80k, even though almost all of my books top 100k, because that’s the dead minimum I need to hit for each book. You can base it on the standards of your genre. I know that I have 10 days remaining, for example, if I hit my goal every day and that can be a driving force to keep working.

As I said, I started at 2k, but it became obvious as time went on that I was easily exceeding that every day. Don’t treat your goal like permission to stop writing. It is the minimum you can write. It is never the maximum you’re allowed. I was routinely exceeding 2k so I raised my goal to 3k. Then 4k and finally 5k a day, 5 days a week. Never be afraid to push yourself. Do more than you have to because the more you write, the better you get at it.

I color-code my chart for easy reference. Green for days I hit or exceed my goal. Red for days I miss it. I haven’t missed it in over a year. Blue are days that I’m either planning or editing and I don’t expect myself to hit an arbitrary goal, and yellow for days that I don’t plan to write, like weekends or holidays. You set your own schedule based on your life, but for me, Monday-Friday is always green. Always. The last time I had a red day was because I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed and I still, literally, crawled down the hall to my office and tried to write and only went back to bed defeated after more than 1k words. I still marked it red because I missed my goal. There are no points for trying. Take it seriously. I always do.

Finally, as I said, don’t be afraid to surpass your goal. I will constantly assign myself new mini-goals as I write every day. Close to the end of a chapter? Finish it! Nearing some arbitrary number of words in your manuscript? Reach it! It’s rare when a day goes by and I don’t try to hit some new arbitrary goal. “I can do that!” and I do it. It’s rare that I don’t exceed my 5k goal by a significant margin. Recently, I’ve taken to throwing in additional goals every 15-20k words. I’ll just decide out of the blue that by this day, I will hit that goal and I do it. Sometimes, I’ll exceed it and hit the goal earlier than expected. Then I just move my goals up and make it harder. Failure is not an option if you don’t allow it.

Now, let me caution you about setting your goals too high. Back when I started and I kept bumping my goals up, I had, somewhere in the back of my head, a goal of hitting 10k a day. I don’t know why, for some reason, I just wanted to finish the first draft of a book every two weeks, so I pushed myself to do 7.5k a day as a goal. I found that while I could hit it most of the time, I was struggling to just get words down, any words, no matter how terrible, because I just had to hit that number. Just writing to write is not achieving success. You are wasting your time. So, realizing that I’d bitten off too much, I went back to 5k and stayed there. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go over 7.5k a day regularly, I do. I think today, as I’m writing this, I went over 8k, but I do it because I can, not because I must. I don’t hit my 5k and stop. I only stop when I’m forced to, either by other commitments or by my brain melting down. That happens. Learn to recognize it and don’t push yourself beyond that point. It won’t help your finished product at all. I may push my goal up again some day, but not right now. Right now, I’m doing just fine and I’m satisfied with my output and it’s just numbers on a page anyhow. I hold myself accountable for my production. You can too, in fact, you must if you hope to get anywhere useful in the writing game. Don’t try to compete with anyone because everyone is different. Just pick your goals, push yourself, don’t be afraid to work hard and you’ll be fine. Track your output and I think that if you do push yourself, you’ll exceed what you think you can do.