I was home with the Little Man yesterday and so I had a little more time than usual to get in some writing. Turned out to be a record-setting day for me–at least for the 65 days that I’ve been keeping automated records:

I managed to write nearly 3,200 words of fiction yesterday, which, as you can see from my almanac record above, broke my previous record of 2,259 words back on March 27. I did it in two sessions. The first, while the Little Man was napping, nabbed me 2,000 words. The second, late in the afternoon, got me another 1,200 words. I was very pleased. And yet, having given it some thought, I think I was more impressed by Sunday’s effort, which netted me only 250 words. The reason is that Sunday was so incredibly busy and hectic, that under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t even tried to get any writing done. But I didn’t want to break the chain. I wanted to maintain my streak, and so when 15 minutes of time presented itself, I jumped on it and wrote as much as I could squeeze into that 15 minute period.

It’s a good sign. Even when there isn’t much time, or I don’t particularly feel like writing, I am getting the writing done.

If writing was like baseball, and each writing session represented a hit, then I suppose you could say that yesterday, I bested Joe DiMaggio for the consecutive game hitting streak record. Joe is famous, in part, for having hit safely in 56 consecutive ball games back in 1941, a feat that no one has come close to duplicating. Yesterday, I wrote about 1,600 words, which is about twice my daily average. This morning, when I glanced at my daily almanac entry for yesterday, I saw that I have now written fiction for 57 consecutive days. I also passed the 50,000 word-mark during my writing yesterday.

It brings my 57-day total to 50,987 words. I’m averaging about 895 words per day. Sometimes  less, and other times, like yesterday, quite a bit more.

Unlike DiMaggio, I won’t be going into the Hall of Fame for this record, but each day now represents a new personal best, and on the days when I am utterly worn out and consider skipping writing that day, I find myself horrified at the thought that I might break the streak–and so I write. I guess my little record-keeping mechanism is really paying off.

When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was look at my daily almanac entry that is automatically sent to Evernote each night to see the numbers that I knew would show up there today. This is what I saw:

I have now written fiction for 50 consecutive days. I can’t be certain, but I believe that this is the first time I have ever done this, since I first began trying to write for publication way back in January of 1993. Even during NaNoWriMo (which is only 30 days), there would be days that I just didn’t write. But now, I’ve written fiction for 50 consecutive days. First, let me go through the numbers, then I’ll provide some thoughts on the experience so far.

The numbers

In the last 50 days (February 27 through April 17 inclusive) I wrote 44,296 words of fiction. That amounts to an average of 886 words per day. I aim to get 500 words written each day, and indeed this is the goal I have set in my almanac. My almanac tracks the number of consecutive days I write, but it also keep track of those days when I meet or beat my goal. The best I did during this 50 day interval was meet or exceed my goal for 25 consecutive days. On my lowest day, I wrote 199 words (back on April 10). On my best day, I wrote 2,259 words (on March 27, my birthday). I wrote less than 500 words on only 6 of the 50 days.

Here is what the 50 days of writing looks like plotted over time:

You can see from the trend line that the amount I write each day is steadily increasing, and I think that makes sense because the longer I go, the more I get better at making use of the time that I have to write each day. It’s the low days and high days that interest me most. And, because I capture what I write each day (including what I change) in Evernote automatically, I can look at what I wrote on those low and high days and see what it was that I was writing that made me struggle or excel. Sometimes, the only factor is time. The minutes of the day are used up and I can only spare 10 minutes and get in a few paragraphs. On the days I excel (my birthday, for instance) I happened to have more time available, or made good use of the time I had.

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I am currently away on an Internet Vacation. I’ll be back online on March 31. I have written one new post for each day of my Vacation so that folks don’t miss me too much while I am gone. But keep in mind, these posts have been scheduled ahead of time. Feel free to comment, as always, but note that since I am not checking email, I will likely not be replying to comments until I am back from my Vacation on March 31. With that said, enjoy!

Each time I hear Hemingway’s famous quip, “kill your darlings,” I cringe a little inside. I do this, not because the advice is no good. The advice is very good. But I believe writers too often consider it in too literal a manner and so hesitate to take the necessary action. The necessary action in question is cutting from a story the stuff that doesn’t work, the stuff that isn’t story. It took me a long time to learn how to do this, and I wish I could have learned it sooner. Part of the problem is that as a writer, you sometimes fall in love with your own words. You’ll spin a wonderful turn of phrase, and then hesitate to kill it because you like the sound of it. You are not thinking objectively, you are not thinking about the story. But you can’t help it. You don’t want to lose the line, so err toward leaving it in. It might be a great line, but as far as the story goes, it just doesn’t belong. The same is true for a paragraph, a scene, or even a chapter.

My problem with the “kill your darlings” philosophy is that it is too often interpreted as a kind of hard-hearted excision. The only thing to do is to delete the line (or paragraph, scene or chapter) and lose that little gem. You sacrifice for the greater good of the story.

What occurred to me many years ago was: Why kill your darlings? Why not simply fire them. I’ve written about this before in other contexts. Rather than thinking of killing your darlings as losing them forever, simply excise them from the manuscript and move them into a “darlings” file. I call this my “deleted scenes” file and I have one for every story I’ve ever written. This worked like magic for me. Once I started doing this–moving the parts of the story that didn’t work out of the story and into the “darlings” file–I instantly stopped hesitating on my cutting. It became much easier knowing that I wasn’t actually losing the words I’d written. Instead, I was firing them, so to speak. And like a fired actor who goes onto do wonders in another role, those fired passages could be used again in some other story where there work better.

These days, I don’t delete anything I write. In part, this is because I’m obsessive about data and analytics, but with respect to my writing, it is incredibly useful for me to see what didn’t work. I can learn a lot from the stuff that I might otherwise have highlighted and deleted from the digital ether forever.

There are plenty of ways you can do this. In Scrivener, I have a fiction template that contains a “Deleted Scenes” folder. In Google Docs, I’ve modified an existing template that has a “Deleted Scenes” section at the end of the document. The same could be done in Word or even a simple text editor. It works best in Scrivener and Google Docs where you can do things to “compile” a manuscript that leaves out certain parts of it. But with a little effort, it could work anyway. And the benefit of this idea, for me, was crucial in my ability to be able to cut what needed cutting from my stories. Maybe it will work for you, too.