We all want to know how well we're doing, whether we're writing a book, working on a painting or just doing the day job. The question, always, is how do you measure that? Particularly with something as oddly intangible as a book?

The blunt way is the daily word count. Scrivener does a fantastic job of that as you can see below. You can set yourself a session target and a project target. Then aim for both and away you go.

Is this a good idea? Yes and no.

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<strong><span style="font-weight:normal;"><img style="float:right;margin-left:0;" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-13-at-08-13-24.png" alt="Screen shot 2010-04-13 at 08.13.24.png" width="259" height="217"></span>For the yes party</strong>

Books are finite objects. They will run to a certain length -- between 105,000 and 125,000 words usually in my case -- and must do their job within that length otherwise something has gone wrong. Anyway you look at it you need to monitor the length of a book, and its individual components -- scenes, sections, parts. You can read <a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-13-at-08-13-24.png2010/02/19/target-practice/" target="_blank">more on this subject here.</a>

<strong>For the no camp</strong>

Books aren't written they're created. Writing just means putting words on paper. Creating means building a story and polishing it to something hopefully approaching perfection. Cutting five thousand unnecessary words from a draft manuscript is a creative act. A blunt word count will whine that you've done something wrong. You're failing, going backwards even. <em>This simply isn't true.</em>

Daily word counts in particular can be highly deceptive. We've all done the calculations. This book will be 100,000 words long. I will write 10K words a week. In ten weeks I'll have a book! Fat chance. And if you <em>do</em> have a book using this production line technique the chances are you've got one that needs a hell of a lot of work (unless you are exceptional, and exceptional people do exist).

The purpose in writing a book is to produce a story that reflects the best of your abilities. Not to meet a daily production target. A word count only tells you how many words you've written. This is useful but not vital, and certainly not an infallible indicator of how a project is proceeding.

<strong>How it works for me</strong>

I don't work to a particular daily target when I'm writing. My personal habits tend to revolve around scenes, not word counts. I find it difficult to leave a scene in mid-air at the end of the day. Generally speaking my scenes run anywhere between 800 and 2,500 words. So I'll tend to crack on until that scene is finished, or left with sufficient notes to complete the following day.

Yes, I keep an eye on that session target in Scrivener above. But that's mainly to check on the length of the scene in question, not to convince myself the book is still on track. That 1,500 session target you see above is just a median length for the average scene or chunk-of-scene. I want to know I'm not going too much above that or below it (normally the former) too often.

What's important for me is to feel that a project is alive and kicking. That I'm wrapped up in it, have some idea of its direction and eventual conclusion, even if I'm not completely clear how I will get there. This means that inevitably there will be weeks when the overall word count may not shift much at all, and may indeed fall back because I'm cutting to get the flow of the narrative right. That doesn't mean the thing is going backwards. In fact the worst way to deal with a floundering book is to keep on writing regardless in the hope that at some stage you will break through some imaginary wall and work out what the hell is going on.

Never happened for me. Though, as always, it may be different for you.