Does it still count as writing if your word count is negative?

petersbusiness
May 4
2 min read

Chapter Two when I sat down this morning: 3,114 words.

Chapter Two at the end of the day: 2,900 words

And the thing is, it really was a productive day of writing. I’ve been feeling stuck for the last few weeks. I’m getting closer to understanding how my current novel needs to end, but somehow it still turns to mush in my hands when I try to pick it up and work on it.

Today I changed my whole approach. There are a lot of places I’ve flagged where things need to be changed. I’ve filed those mentally. (I've never been a fan of memory aids like Scrivener.) But because I could see them clearly in my mind, I hadn’t gotten around to going in and doing it.

Today, seeing nothing else productive to do with the day, I went in and did it. I pulled half a dozen sections out of my Google doc that, together, make up chapter two, and I dropped them into a new Word doc and I got busy with, you know, scissors and glue.

Mostly scissors.

So my word count for the day—that measure of productivity that writers seem to obsess about—was negative.

But that’s a good thing, because (and here’s another metaphor to throw into the mix) writing is like Sudoku in some ways. Every row, every column, and every block of nine squares needs to have character, setting, conflict, stakes, inciting incident, resolution…all of that. And just like in Sudoku, where pinning down a number in one corner can clarify what needs to go in a blank square on the opposite side of the board, changes made in one scene force changes elsewhere. I chase unknowns around the board. If this square is a 2, then this other square can't be a 2 so it has to be a 5. Other scenes come into sharp focus.