Friday, March 11, 2011

Tracking Novel Word Counts With Handy Excel Graphs

I'm happy to say that, with only a minor amount of frustration, I've remembered my Excel skills enough to create a chart of my daily word count goals and achievements!

As you can see, I'm a little bit behind from where I'd ideally like to be at this point. I'm heading for a total novel length of 87,000 words in a little under a month, which makes for about 3,000 words a day.

I just broke 12,000 words, and I'm actually feeling pretty motivated today compared to the past few days. I have at least one more fifteen minute sprint left in me.

Why is it so necessary that I write a novel in a month? Is it important for you as a novel writer to attempt the same? Well, for one thing, I've got a mentor who is quite insistent that I do things this way. I don't want to risk his wrath if I fail to follow through on the challenge. And personally, I've tried writing a novel over weeks or months, and I've tried writing one in under thirty days, and doing the latter always makes it more likely that I'll finish. I suggest that you try out both, and see which works best for you.

If you're interested on writing a novel in a month as well, check out this handy list of novel writing months.

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