More on Word Points

The topic of “word points” is one I’ve been meaning to bring up for weeks. Thanks, Stephanie, for writing on it so I could remember I wanted to discuss it, too! Several of you have asked about how we track the points and what values we assign.

THIS IS COMPLETELY UP TO YOU!

But here is a picture of my Excel spreadsheet. I’m a number cruncher, so I like spreadsheets. I also like them to be detailed so I have a variety of information at a glance. To that end, I created a spreadsheet with formulas to track how many word points I earned today, but how many this month, and how I compare to my target goal.

In the picture here, I’ve based the goal on the 30-day month of November. You have to change the formulas a bit to hit a 28 or 31-day goal. The “Acc” is my accumulated points from the 1st through the present. The “Mn” is how much of the month has gone by at the end of that day.

The next column is the percentage of the month so far times the word point goal. So on the 1st, I need to have hit 1667 by the end of the day, 5001 words by the end of the 3rd, etc., to hit 50,000 words or word points by the end of November. (I did this sheet for NaNoWriMo originally.)

That’s the math. The column headings are for the things I was willing to give a word point value to. This is very individual and you should choose to please yourself. After all, it is you who will feel pleased or guilty about your progress, so make your goal your own. For instance, Stephanie once gave a word point value to getting her family moved. She liked the system enough to use it for lots of things.

I only want to track writing and writing-related activities. And I wanted to focus on getting writing done, so I gave very few points to non-writing but writing-related activities like research, reading “how to” books, and writing things like this blog. The bulk of my points should come from writing if I am in “writing” mode as opposed to “editing” or “brainstorming” mode.

On my spreadsheet, I give myself 1000 points for every edited (completed) scene, and 500 points per hour of brainstorming or researching. Reading of any kind and writing on anything except my novel has a daily maximum number of points. That ceiling is low because it’s easy to say you’re working on your book without actually writing on your book. I didn’t want to give myself too much credit if I wasn’t doing something to get the book finished.

Here is a sample of what a filled in Writing Accomplishments sheet looks like:

To create your own sheet, I suggest first deciding what you most want to accomplish. Break it down into pieces – like writing, editing, brainstorming, etc. Assign values so that the most important pieces get higher values – or choose to give the same value to everything if you feel it’s all equally important to you. When I was trying to decide what values to use, I figured out how many words I can write in an average hour – about 750 (or 3 pages). My scenes are usually 5-10 pages long, but I didn’t want editing to have the same value because it usually goes a little quicker than writing. So I decided on 1000 points per scene. For brainstorming and researching, I didn’t want to give more than 2/3 the value of writing, with the other 1/3 given to reading books on craft. Thus the 500 points per hour and 250 points per hour, respectively. My non-novel writing and fiction reading are both important to me, so I wanted to give myself credit, but not too much credit. I could easily spend 3 or 4 hours a day reading a great book and telling myself that reading is as important as writing! So they both have low daily limits – 250 points and 100 points. (And no matter how bad the day, I could always tell myself that I can earn 100 points just by reading for a little while. It’s a mental health moment as well as good for my writing.)

If you’re not a computer person, you can create something similar using notebook paper. It’s a useful way to see if you’re getting more done than you realize, or to see that you need to get on the ball again. Let us know if you have any questions. We’d be happy to help you get set up!