Writing 500 words seems easy, but publishing 500 words means writing down 3000 words and erasing 2500 of them, so thay you can give the best possible 500.
During the last week, I’ve published 7 articles on my blog:
- Dealing With POV Character Choice – There isn’t an Easy Way – 850 words
- The Perfect Gift for Readers – How I read 44 books in a year – 514 words
- A Character Change – 90 words
- How to Deal with the Emotional Roller Coaster of Writing – 628 words
- Building Time-blocks – 342 words
- Dictation Can Make Your Sentences Shorter and Significantly Improve Your Writing – 559 words
- Writing about Lonely Women – 494 words
Summa summarum, that’s 3,477 words for the last week. That’s not much since there are writers who can knock out 2,000 words per day or even more. If this was some kind of competition, I would probably be losing it badly.
However, there is a behind the scenes statistics provided by Grammarly who thoroughly tracks all my writing input. Their record says that I’ve written 23,852 words, which is 6.86 times more than I’ve published.
When you check the graph, you realize that’s my weekly average; all the bars are approximately the same hight.
Since my novel is still in the index card phase, I only wrote blog articles on my laptop and very few e-mails per week.
That roughly means that for every 500 words that I publish, I erase 2500 of them. This leaves you, the reader, with the best possible words that I can produce at the given moment.
A 100-word article, which seems like an easy peasy task, is a 600 words or so article boiled down to only 100 words.
The initial 600 words are usually my ramblings, unclear thoughts, mixed feelings, basically a huge cluster of random thoughts on a chosen topic.
During my editing process, I rearrange, cut, and rarely add more. I make my sentences shorter, and try to make my thoughts sharper.
Sometimes, I fail and give you something which could be significantly better. I publish it anyway because I’ve set myself a goal to publish daily and I’m aware that more than half of my articles are way below average.
Unfortunately, I’ve only got an hour or two per day for my blogs. For some topics, that’s not as nearly as enough time.
The thing that pushes me forward is the fact that I’m noticing a significant improvement in my writing; each day I’m getting sharper. It feels like playing bullet chess; a constant race between the clock and the thoughts. Which move to make, which words to write down.
The reason I’m writing all of these is not to brag with my productivity, but to encourage you to write more; to show you that there is nothing wrong with trashing huge chunks of your writing.
Just trash whatever feel sufficient, unclear and generally bad. Your readers will be thankful.