The Great Writing Experiment

In three weeks of tracking my writing time, I have learned some things I never would have imagined about my writing.

1. The story I understand the best takes the longest to write. Consistently. I'm not sure if it's the pressure or what, but it was more than a little startling to see Summerlight ranking at the very bottom when it came to my words per minute.

2. I write in tiny sessions, averaging no longer than 15 minutes. And yet, words get written. Wow.

3. Clearly, first draft is best, though if I must redraft, apparently third is better than second, probably because I've muddled through possibilities and settled on what I actually want to do.

4. I write better on workdays than weekends. I'm not sure how to analyze that.

5. Mornings and evenings are my best writing time. I write terribly low word counts in the afternoon.

6. I write best on the computer, but if I must write somewhere else, it doesn't seem to matter much where.

7. This one I knew: I am apparently quite slow at longhand.

8. I be shocked. Written? Kitten!, which I thought was absolutely not the tool for me, blows all the rest of them out of the water, except the occasionally inspired LJ commentfic or Semagic, when I don't want to post it immediately. Microsoft Word and Notepad come up about even, and anything else is in the basement.

 

I highly recommend actually tracking your writing time. I note down date, start time, end time, story, word count, method, medium, and location. I discovered some of my biases made me think I was most effective with one set of circumstances (afternoons on Microsoft Word or a notebook, for example) when, in fact, I am most effective with others (Written? Kitten! in mornings or evenings).

Have you ever tracked your writing time? What did you learn?

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