Measuring The Hard Part

The hardest part of writing is always at the end of the story.  This is when you have to go back through the entire novel, finding all the typos, erroneous words, poor grammar, plot screw-ups, factual errors, inconsistencies, character flaws - all the things that ruin a great story.  It's hard, tedious work.  And all of us hate doing it.  It is also hard to measure your progress when doing this type of activity.  But we now think we have a solution.

From now on, we will keep track of the number of words we add (or delete), since knowing the total size of our book is still important to us.  But we will also track the number of pages we go through.  This might actually give us a better indication of how productive we have been.  We don't care if a page has a correction or is already perfect - it is important that the page contributes to the story's structure, tone, style, and content.  If we were brilliant enough to write the page so well that it doesn't need any corrections, that's just peachy.  If we have to make a lot of corrections, then that means our story was just not that well constructed.

Further, we can take the total size of the novel, divide it by the number of days we intend to edit, and get a daily target.  That way, we can see how productive we really are.

And that is how we will measure the hard part.