How I Write - 2024 By The Numbers

Yesterday, in an absolutely marathon editing session, I put the finishing touches on PROJECT SHARD, hopefully to go out on submission next year. As I've done for the past two years, when I finish up my creative writing work for the year, I put together my end-of-year numbers post!

This is the third year I've done this. Here's the previous two years - 2022, 2023.

The last two editions of this post are consistently one of the most popular on my website, so I'm hoping another year of data will prove even more useful, especially in documenting the ups and downs of becoming a published author.

Caveat Writer

As I say at the start of every one of these posts - this is not a yardstick. Please don't look at anything I write here as a challenge, a brag or even a stick to beat yourself with. I'm lucky enough to still have the golden combo of stable employment with no commute, good physical and mental health, supportive family and no unpredictable caring responsibilities.

I post these numbers posts as a form of accountability for myself and a data point for those trying to work out their own sustainable writing practices. Please take what might work for you too and ignore anything that doesn't.

Also, once we get into the numbers, you will see that my numbers do not, in fact, always go up.

What got written?

This year I've worked on three different novels and one piece of short fiction over the course of the year. That was more novel work than last year and four fewer short stories. I also spent a lot of time working on outlines, pitches and other ancillary activities, but we'll come to that.

• I spent most of January kind of farting around, after the push-to-the-finish on editing A RELUCTANT SPY the previous December. That included writing lectures to deliver at Napier University, drafting pitches for two possible sequels and getting caught up with critique reading. It was a very low word count month.
• In February, while waiting for proofs on A RELUCTANT SPY, I worked on organising and then re-planning an edit for PROJECT SHARD, after I was lucky enough to get ten sets of beta reader comments back. It was a slightly overwhelming amount of feedback, so I also spent a bunch of time doing a giant wall of sticky notes in an attempt to make sense of it.
• In early March, I dropped everything for a couple of weeks to proof A RELUCTANT SPY.
• From mid-March until mid-June, I did a long, very slow sequential edit of PROJECT SHARD, start to finish, using my beta readers comments. During this time I also did edits and proofs on a couple of short stories for Analog and the Nova Scotia anthology, as well as briefly writing another pitch for my editor in mid-April. But I think of this time as my Spring Slog. This was also when all the TV auction stuff was happening for A RELUCTANT SPY, so I'm not going to be too hard on myself. But it was a long, fiddly edit that got deeply tedious towards the end.
• July and August were very distracted, hopping around between short story drafting, more pitches (I wrote pitches for four different novel ideas over the course of the year) workshop prep for Cymera and then Glasgow Worldcon, which was incredible.
• September was weirdly productive, considering it was my launch month for A RELUCTANT SPY. I did a lot of writing on trains, went to Bloody Scotland, had an amazing book launch in Blackwell's in Edinburgh and somehow mostly finished the sample I was writing for PROJECT SCARLET.
• In October, I hopped around between edits on the SCARLET sample and more edits on SHARD, which my agent and one of my critique partners had read.
• In November, I packed the SCARLET sample off to my editor and went back to SHARD, working steadily through a big list of edits from my agent. I stopped a couple of times to address feedback from my editor on SCARLET, then went back to SHARD again (notice a theme emerging? This was the year of going back and forth).
• At the start of December I realised I wasn't getting anywhere fast with my attempts to surgically edit SHARD and I just needed to bite the bullet and crack on with a front-to-back readthrough. I started that in the first week of December and finished it yesterday, while also managing a daily commute for the first time since 2019 (I had to be in Edinburgh every day for about a week and a half). Lots of writing on trains and in coffee shops. But I was absolutely determined not to drag this edit into another year, so yesterday I sat down and edited the last 30,000 words of the novel in one go, working for several hours to get it done. I'm knackered.

How did I work?

This is Year 6 of my regular writing routine (Monday to Friday, 06:15-07:45) so I won't go over my daily routine in too much detail, although I am overdue for an update post on how it works in practice. Here's the theory, anyway, though it has evolved.

In general though, my writing time was much, much more bitty and fragmented than in previous years. I had a lot of travel and a lot of small bits of time-sensitive work that meant I never really got on a roll of steady, productive days. And the one long period of consistent effort, my Spring Slog through the SHARD edit, was mostly, in retrospect, a period of extremely slow-moving procrastination disguised as steady work.

It turns out, launching a book, dealing with a TV auction, going to four book festivals (including the biggest SFF book festival and biggest crime writing festival in the UK) and, haha, starting a near-daily blogging habit is all kind of time-consuming, stressful and actually has an impact! Who could have foreseen that? Certainly not me.

It's Metric Time

Okay, time to put down some actual figures. As in previous years, this isn't to-the-minute or to-the-word accurate. I'm only human and lose track of time when I'm writing sometimes. Also, I can't actually give precise words-added and words-removed totals, because every writing session has a little of both. Just like previous years though, I think I can say the numbers below are probably around 5% plus or minus the actual numbers.

Writing time

In 2024, I wrote for about 366.1 hours. I think this is fairly accurate, since I had fewer marathon sessions this year where I lost track of time. It is, however, over 60 hours less than last year, which is roughly eight working weeks less writing (a working week for me is planned as 5 x 1.5 hours, or 7.5 hours a week as a baseline).

This year's number adds up to 15 rounded twenty-four hour days of the year, or about 52 seven-hour working days. So, about 1.7 months of work, on top of my day job. One thing I haven't directly tracked is what I'm going to call non-writing publishing work, i.e. all the stuff that doesn't create new words of fiction, but which is required to sell books. I certainly don't feel like I actually worked any less. It was just on different stuff.

I did something writing related on 239 days of this year, which is 5 fewer days than last year. I spent 34 days drafting new work this year, which is a staggering 50 days fewer than last year (which itself was 40 days fewer than the year before). Editing accounted for 128 days, 2 days fewer than last year, which I think reflects the heavy redrafting I was doing on PROJECT SHARD (again). SHARD has been a fairly big editing drain for two straight years now, so I'm very glad that it's done. The remainder was mostly pitch writing and lots of fiddly little writing tasks that were related to the creative work but not actually writing fiction (like writing articles to go with the launch for A RELUCTANT SPY).

Drafting

I wrote 83,309 aggregate new fiction words across the whole year, which is a staggering 94,000 fewer words than last year. When I sat down to do my spreadsheets, I was really quite dismayed at this number, because it represented a fairly big failure of my primary goal, which was to start and finish a complete draft of a new novel. This is the first year since 2019 when I haven't done that. That... doesn't feel great, if I'm honest.

About a third of that total was on the PROJECT SCARLET sample's various drafts, with the rest split between new scenes for SHARD, samples for other pitches and one short story.

Editing

It's not like I transferred all that effort over to editing either - I cut about 30,000 words this year, less than half of my cutting total for last year.

That editing was mostly on SHARD, with a big cut during the Spring Slog, then another chunk of words cut (in a third of the time) in December. There were a couple of big chunks cut out (memorably I chopped about 7k words from SHARD in one big lump) but nearly all of the rest of that editing was line-by-line detailed paragraph work.

Min-Maxing

My shortest writing session was again about 30 minutes. The least I wrote in a drafting session was 122 words. I had seven sub-500 word drafting days in the year, which is about twenty fewer than last year. So when I did draft, I mostly did so at a decent clip.

My longest writing session was about six hours. My highest single day word count was a decent 3,165 words on a short story. That was a 2.5 hour writing day. I had zero other 3,000+ word days, which is a huge reduction on previous years. My long writing days and high word counts from last year are a distant memory.

Once again, the vast majority of my drafting days were somewhere between 800 and 1,500 words, though the lack of any really big days has pulled the average down.

Averages and consistency

Once again, a quick reminder that I don't work to word count targets, but I do record them. Here, again, is how I break down my rough bands of word count achievements.

• Any day I write is a win, full stop, the end.
• If I get more than 500 words, I consider it a reasonable day.
• If I get more than 1,000 words, it's a good day.
• If I get more than 1,500 words, it's a very good day.
• If I get more than 2,000 words, it's a great day.
• If I get more than 2,500 words, it's a superb day.
• If I get more than 3,000 words, it's a BEAST MODE day. I got one of these in 2024, which is a big reduction on last year.

Averaged out, my daily word count is 349 words (which is half of last year). My median is 533 (less than half of last year). My average words-per-hour over the year is 228 (a little less than half of last year).

This year was a stark lesson for me in the importance of focus. While days in the chair, clocking in at the Word Factory, do add up, they only get you where you want to go if you plan your work and actually finish things. I did plan my work, but in reality that plan disintegrated somewhat in a year of intense distractions both personal and publishing-related. I spun my wheels a lot in 2024. The impact is very clear. More on that later.

What about previous years?

I won't rehash the summaries of the previous four or five years like I did in the first of these posts, and I've been comparing last year's figures with this year's throughout the post. But here's the headline numbers for the last three years.

• 2024 - 366 hours, 83,309 words drafted, 29,852 words cut
• 2023 - 426 hours, 177,140 words drafted, 63,516 words cut
• 2022 - 404 hours, 201,478 words drafted, 52,057 words cut

My lesson the last couple of years was consistency, consistency, consistency. My lesson for this year is the same, except now I can see the results of not being consistent.

Lessons and plans

I thought it'd be interesting to take a quick look back at what I wanted to do in 2024. Here's the relevant paragraph:

Next year, it's all about consistency again - basically this year but even more consistent. I'm not going to overschedule myself, working 2-3 months ahead on my calendar instead of trying to pre-plan the whole year.

Turns out, if you play things fast and loose in a year when you're going to be barraged by external demands and factors outside your control, you end up flip-flopping from one project to another and back again, the writing you do manage to get done feels like a slog and you finish the year having not finished a book for the first time in half a decade.

Now, this year was not a failure, by any real metric - I released my debut novel, had four short stories published, went to a bunch of amazing festivals, wrote tens of thousands of words of non-fiction (blog posts, guest blogs, articles and more), ran workshops and lectures, managed to be a pretty consistent critique partner and beta reader. And I remained a functional human being, did well at my day job and mostly felt pretty okay.

But I absolutely did not meet my writing goals for the year. I now have a very new and deep appreciation of why most authors experience plummeting productivity when they begin to do the job of being an author alongside the previous job of being a writer. Those are, really, two different but closely interlinked jobs.

Before 2024, my life was divided roughly in three. Firstly there was my actual life (being a husband, son, brother, friend, and human being who needs things like sleep and fresh air and time with family). Then there was my day job, which keeps the lights on and is a fascinating and fun career in its own right. And then there was writing, which encapsulated everything from actually drafting words to querying, community building and more.

But that changed in 2024 - there's a new, very large wedge in the pie chart of my life, which is publishing/being an author. So I've gone from managing a full-time job and a part-time job (being a writer) to a full-time job and two part-time jobs in the same amount of time. Is it any wonder my productivity roughly halved?

So how am I going to approach next year? I have a three-fold plan. Compartmentalise, Plan and Deliver.

• Compartmentalise - I'm going to set and enforce strict boundaries between all aspects of my life (being a person, doing my day job, writing and publishing) but especially between writing and publishing. This can be difficult because writing is a key input to publishing and vice-versa, but wherever possible I'm going to try and write like there's nobody waiting for it, at a steady and sustainable pace, with publishing activities strictly segregated from the actual production of words.
• Plan - I'm going to have a high-level plan for the whole year that will include completing at least one and hopefully two novels. I went into 2024 thinking flexibility would be key, but the result was that events, dear boy, events kicked me around a fair bit. I thought I was doing fine at the time, but I think in retrospect it's clear that the lack of a clear long-term plan combined with the rash of new demands that come with publishing a book absolutely did a number on me. So, in 2025, I'll actually have a plan for the whole year and I'll attempt to stick to it.
• Deliver - The last couple of years have been an interesting experiment for me in selling work on proposal. I'm pretty good at it, I think - I can write a good pitch and a very detailed outline and an enticing sample. But I spent a lot of time this year, frankly, faffing, while I waited for various decisions or rounds of feedback. I filled some of that time with editing, but a lot of it with just farting around with outlines and pitches and post-it notes. So in 2025, I'm going to focus on writing and finish whole books, as quickly and sustainably as I can manage. I'm a fast drafter, so if there's a choice between writing a 20,000 word sample and waiting 2-3 months to see if it's going to fly or just writing a book in roughly the same time period, I'm pretty sure 'write the book' is the correct answer for me.

Final thoughts

This is my third year of writing this annual roundup. And it has been a decidedly mixed year when you go by the metrics above. But, of course, a life judged purely by numbers is a hollow thing indeed - by many other measures this was one of the best years of my entire life, fulfilling a lifelong dream and opening up opportunities to fulfil even more.

It was also a year when I made many more connections, went to dozens of events, cheered on friends as they fulfilled their own goals and lived a whole life outside writing that is also going pretty well. So, I'm taking this year of reduced word counts and fragmented, frustrating writing in my stride. I now know what effect 'being an author' will have on me if I don't have a plan to mitigate it. And forewarned is forearmed. I hope I'll manage that balance better in 2025.

Overall though, it's been a good year. If you're a writer, I hope you had a more productive year than I did and got a lot of words down. And if you struggled a bit like I did, I hope this post is a reminder that despite appearances, this is a difficult and demanding art form and sometimes it's okay to just get done what you can.

Above all, be kind to yourself. I forget where I first heard this, but I've said it a lot to myself (and others) this year. Always remember - if beating yourself up worked as a motivational method, it would have worked already.

See you in 2025!

If this post was interesting for you, or you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them over on Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads.