Christian Fiction Bloggers discussion

I have a new system for keeping track of my daily word count goal, and I was curious to see if others have one as well. If you have a visual system (that you can photograph) like a calendar on the wall, M&Ms in a jar, whatever, and you want to share it for my blog post on this topic, I'd love to see it. Send it to me in a message. If you want to include a few words of explanation, that's fine, but please don't send me anything too detailed. I can only use a couple sentences for a caption if it will help explain your system. Thanks!!

What do you mean by "Daily Word Count Goal," Celeste? Please explain. That is a new term to me. I'm thinking it's not simply the count on the words you are using while writing your story, right?

That's exactly what it is. For example...if I want to write an 80,000 word novel and I'd like to finish it in 6 months, I'd need to write 13,333 words each month, or 3,333 words per week or 666 words per day. So My daily word count goal would be 666 words. In order to know if I was going to meet my finish date goal, I'd have to have some way to track my daily word count. This is what I'm interested in exploring...what methods do people use to keep track? I personally use something called a planner pad and those little stars they used to stick on our papers on kindergarten. :^) But I am always trying to learn from others so I wanted to do a post featuring methods other writers use. Does that help?

Thank you, Celeste.

Personally I don't have a deadline for my book. My desire is for the story to be exactly the way I'd like it to be when I'm done, so I simply keep working and don't worry about how many words it has, or how many I've written for the day, nor when it will be done.

In the end, if I find that I have too few words or too many, I take care of that while I'm going through the first edit, either eliminating unnecessary words (as I am doing now with my next story: There Abideth Hope) or expound upon an idea (which I did in A Very Present Help).

In your case, and others who are going about it the way you are, you could simply use the word count in the lower left hand corner of your screen in Microsoft to let you know how many words you are starting with for the day, add the desired amount (count) to that to get a total, write it on a sticker to be placed near the screen, and stop when you reach the total.

Hope that helps a little. Happy counting. :D