2020 is nearly over (thank goodness)! I decided to try something and see how much I wrote this year – I felt like I wrote a lot more than in previous years, and so I wanted to do some maths and see exactly what that all amounted to.
Here are the categories in which I break up my writing:
- Blog Posts
- Short Story Writing
- Fanfiction Writing
- Novel Writing
- Approximate Novel Editing (because it’s hard to get an exact number here, I’m just going off the estimates I can guarantee)
I’m also breaking all of this writing into two categories: Scrapped Writing and Kept Writing.
Scrapped writing is any project I worked on that I ultimately stopped for one reason or another. Kept writing is anything that is still being worked on, or was published in some way shape or form.
Without further ado, let’s get started!
Blog Posts
This was the year I got back into writing blog posts. After a 3-year hiatus (before which I only wrote 1-2 blog posts a year), I wrote 19 this year – more posts in one year than I had in any of the previous five. Part of that can be attributed to the pandemic giving me more free time, but some of it was also just motivation to do better and post more often. So let’s take a look at the numbers!
Published Posts: 20, 241 words
Unpublished/Scrapped Posts: 4, 104 words
It’s funny actually seeing it all in numbers. There are times I could’ve sworn I wrote an entire novel-length blog post (looking at you, Making a Modern Pokemon Game). Other posts that I thought were super short turned out to be a little bit longer than expected. Ultimately, though, I’ve published most of the blog writing I’ve done this year, which is saying something!
Blog Post Writing Total: 24, 345 words.
Short Story Writing
Hoo boy. Before I even get started, I already know how this is going to go: my scrapped pile is going to be a lot bigger than the kept pile. That’s partly because I’m neurotic and never think my writing is ever that good, thus hiding it from the rest of the world; it’s also because, around the start of the pandemic, I started several different ideas that I felt never went anywhere and thus never continued to work on.
A note to be made here: I didn’t count the short stories I’ve posted on here as blog post writing, so they are getting counted here. In fact, they are the only stories that will actually be counted in the kept pile. So let’s get started!
Published/Kept Writing: 4, 613 words
Scrapped/Unfinished Writing: 10, 123 words
Yuuuuup. Figured as much. Interestingly enough, the kept writing comes from just 4 stories, whereas the scrapped writing comes from 6. Will I eventually go back to those 6 stories?…maybe. At this point I’ve started so many projects, it seems unlikely.
Short Story Writing Total: 14, 736 words
Fanfiction Writing
Heh. So I had never really written fanfiction before. At least, not as deliberate fanfiction. Sure, a few stories were heavily inspired by others or I would take core concepts and twist them around, but it was never anything I let see the light of day and never anything I actually called fanfiction at the time.
Then, two things happened: the pandemic hit, and J.K. Rowling really reared her ugly head as a terrible person (I mean, we all have kinda known this since HP ended, but boy howdy did she ramp it up this last year). Suddenly, I was inspired to write a Harry Potter fanfiction that took place in the modern era, showcasing a new-and-improved Hogwarts that was not full of weird bigoted nonsense. And thus, Leticia Lunetti was born!
For this count, there actually isn’t a scrapped pile – thus far everything I’ve written (other than some light editing) has been published, so it all gets counted! The only count here that isn’t published is the current chapter I’m writing, so the count is a smidge higher than what it shows on Fanfiction.net.
Fanfiction Writing Total: 42, 130
Novel Writing
Aaaand this is where the meat of the writing goes: novel writing. This year, I technically finished two novels: Legend of Samantha Torres, and a rewrite of a really old story from high school that will never actually see the light of day. That second story I’m putting in my scrapped pile, just because, well…yeah, it’s not going anywhere.
Add in the fact that I’m working on another novel, and suddenly this word count gets crazy-ridiculous.
Kept/In-Progress Writing: 50, 465 words
Scrapped Writing: 71, 185 words
So yeahhhhhhhh. That rewrite was a lot of words, but ultimately I’m just not happy with it. If I’m going to try and make it publish-worthy at all, it will require a lot more time and effort than I’m currently willing to put into it, and I’ve really already taken the good bits and used them in other works (or plan to). It does heavily inflate my novel writing count, though 😂
Total Novel Writing Word Count: 121, 650
Approximate Novel Editing
This category is…harder to properly count, and I’m not even sure whether it deserves a place here. Does editing count towards a writing word count? How do you even count what you’ve edited?
I don’t have an easy answer. What I can say is how I’m going to tackle this.
Legend of Samantha Torres was my main writing project this year. Sure, it amounted to just 2/3 the word count of the fun rewrite, but ultimately I spent more actual time on it and did a ton of rewrites and editing. And it is here where I can actually save myself.
See, I’m a mess when writing. I write and rewrite so much. The original draft of LoST looks nothing like its current form (and I am happy with that!). Luckily, I have this neurotic tendency to hold on to scrapped chapters and content, which gives me a word count to work off of. Now, I’m actually rounding down on this a little because there are still concepts and sentences here and there that I held on to, and I am trying to make this somewhat accurate. So let’s see how I did!
Approximate Editing Word Count: 7, 527 words
Not a whole heck of a lot, but still!
But let’s move on to the main show: the year total word count. Obviously we still have a few weeks left and I am gonna be doing some more writing, but I don’t suspect this number will change too much. Are you ready?
Total 2020 Writing Word Count: 210, 388 words
Good lord that’s a lot. I mean, I know I don’t come anywhere near some writers, but goodness gracious that’s a lot. All in all, I’m actually pretty happy with that number – it makes me realize that I was a lot more productive than I thought I was (and this doesn’t even count all my lesson plans or the hundreds of emails I’ve sent…I’m scared to know what those numbers would be).
I’m curious to know what everyone else’s writing counts are! Feel free to post them below and compare.
Thank you for joining me on this wild journey. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, stay safe, and (as always!) don’t get arrested.
Jacob Ryckman 
Great work, Keep it up!