Satisfaction in the Writing Life: Juggling Time (Quantity) and Value (Quality)

How satisfied are you, usually, with what you write? Where does that satisfaction come from—your word count (quantity) or your realization about some writing problem solved (quality) or your time spent (quantity) or your enjoyment of the actual writing process (quality)?

If you mentally checked the quantity response to the questions above, it’s your accountability system, whether words or time, that makes you feel good at the end of each writing session. You got something done. You kept your promise to yourself.

I love accountability. I run with it and I do get stuff done—books published, stories finished, feedback processed and revisions accomplished. I get great pleasure out of making progress on my goals.

But my long-term satisfaction as a writer has changed over the years. Now it also (sometimes even more) comes from something other than measuring my progress. It has to do with realization, learning, and growing.

Depending on where I am in my involvement with a piece of writing, I cycle between the importance of time (accountability) and value (learning).

Time

When I’m in the time band, my goals are to generate material.

Accountability systems work so well during this part of the cycle. I love Jami Attenberg’s #1000words where you are only required to write 1000 words a day. Nanowrimo is beleagured, but I ran that marathon it three times, even got a published book out of it. I’ve used the Pomodoro technique, a tomato-shaped timer that rings at thirty-minutes intervals to remind me to take a break. The timer broke eventually but I used the thirty-minute idea for quite a while.

Gretchen Rubin wrote a fascinating book about our accountability preferences, The Four Tendencies. On her website, you can take a quiz to find out what kind of accountability (internal or external) works best for you. Some of us need an external entity—a class, a program, a timer—to get stuff done. It helps us stay with the writing.

Staying with the writing isn’t the issue for me. I’m able to find accountability within myself, my own goals, but occasionally I’ll hit a slump and need external motivation like a class. But I’m usually satisfied with how much I’ve done each writing session (although sometimes I wonder if I should write more). I haven’t found that a certain amount of words or a certain number of hours motivates me more than just getting an idea and running with it.

But if you aren’t writing, if you’re stuck and unsatisfied with being stuck because you’re not producing, then time is the issue and accountability can be a solution.

Value

For me, though, I can do the time/word count goals and produce writing. What’s more important to me is the value of the experience of sitting down, engaging with my creativity. Over and over, I’m realizing it’s the experience of writing, the dream state I enter, that matters the most. That I learn something. That I risk and grow.

I have had a hard time being satisfied with what I get done each day, in my writing time, unless I learn something new.

Learning has become an accomplishment in itself. It has to do with risk, how much I am willing to put myself out there into new territory and try new ideas. Not just repeat what I know.

How this works in the evolution of a piece

A piece of writing, again, for me, manifests in a sequence of four types of activities. Some of them depends on time (quantity) and some depend on value (quality). It’s been helpful to separate this out for myself, to know what’s demanded.

First comes the dreamy, idea stage. If I use a word count goal for the first stage, when I am dreaming up an idea, it’s harder for me to feel satisfied. I’d rather coach myself on taking risks, stretching creative boundaries, learning stuff. I write by hand to foster this, in a writing notebook. I write to prompts. I allow myself not to be constrained by any direction, let the writing be exploratory. I may not even use any of what I come up with; it’s peeling away layers so I can see what I want to explore further.

Next is the drafting stage. The drafting stage works very well with accountability, quantity, and word count goals. Most systems of accountability say that the quality of my writing for that session doesn’t count as much as the fact that I wrote. That’s as it should be. I’m just trying to churn out enough words to create a rough draft, something I can revise. If I don’t have the words on the page, there’s nothing to revise. It’s simple.

Third is what I call the developmental revision stage, where I’m looking for the core, essence, and purpose of what I’ve drafted, hoping to find a structure. Developmental editing is hard, hard work, and I can’t give it a satisfaction qualifier like a number of words or hours. It’s like wrestling a huge, slippery pig sometimes. You just keep at it. Friends call this the slog phase. This is when I just have to show up and put in my time. I might struggle with one page all day. My focus is on learning, finding what the story is about.

There’s the final revision stage, my favorite, where I’m tuning the piece to my ear, in a way, finding the off notes and correcting them. This can include sentence shaping as line editing, correcting pacing, enhancing the voice. Final revision stage is so exciting to me, I don’t usually need an accountability goal. It’s all about the learning.

Three out of four stages are about value, one depends on accountability. More quality than quantity, all in all. Is this true for you?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

After years of struggling with the persistent feeling that I could always do my writing practice better or differently, I realized that, for me, it comes down to how much I assign worth to each part of my writing process.

This week, ask yourself which stage are you in right now, of the four listed above. Are you assigning the right value to that stage? For instance, if you’re drafting, are you trying to be satisfied with the quality of your work, when this particular stage is all about quantity?

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash