I Write Scenes, Not Words

And why you, too, should dump the daily wordcount metric.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

It is 10pm on a Wednesday night. You have work tomorrow at 6am. The cursor blinks at the end of a sentence, your ambient playlist paused because it distracted you too much. You put your fingers on the keys, formulate a few words, and then take your hands away. You mouse up to the place where you began the night’s session and hit Ctrl+Shift+End. The counter reads 411 words. Your aim for tonight was 1000 words. Now you’re praying you can inch over 500; you can’t rest until it’s done.

It is 10pm on a Wednesday night one week later. You have work tomorrow at 6am. The cursor blinks at the end of a sentence. You mouse up to the place where you began the night’s session and hit Ctrl+Shift+End. The counter reads 411 words. Your aim for tonight was to finish the conversation between the main character and his girlfriend. The scene is complete. Satisfied, you save the file and close your laptop. Now you can rest.

Mindset in writing is everything. Great art is always worth suffering for, but suffering is not always required. Often a large drain on the modern writer is the fear of not writing enough, of missing the wordcount for the day, of under-writing. We live in an age of extreme speed and efficiency, and the urge to write faster, write more, crank out more books, submit to more magazines, write new entries for RoyalRoad, and publish more articles on Substack can be devastating to motivation, and more importantly, to the joy of creation.

Some people live for extreme volumetric writing. Some people have inside them a never-ending, exhaustive wellspring of words, and for better or worse, they can empty thousands of words on the page every day. However, these people are not usually the norm, and both the hobbyist and the serious writer must remember that life still exists outside the page. Forcing oneself to burn through thousands of words simply to meet arbitrary metrics is a guarantor for burnout, and burnout can damage a writer’s creative output for months, sometimes years. It should not have to be this way, and it does not have to be. There is a better way to write consistently.

Currently, there are two primary schools of thought in contemporary e-literature (which I define as the modern style of writing advice popularized online through social media and direct messaging servers like Discord and IRC). The first school of thought is “just write” (JW). The theory behind it is simple and effective: like anything else with a skill metric, the best way to get better (at first) is to Just Do It. This is an entry-level approach mostly meant for beginner writers to take them to the next stage of creation. JW can be bent into a horseshoe as well, with advanced writers having such an intuitive feel for storytelling that JW becomes the way they create (or stumble upon) their best writing.

The second school of thought is “words per day” (WPD), which emphasizes setting and reaching a certain number of words per day. It is closely related to the idea that hours at the workbench equals progress in the skill—that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in anything. This school of thought is aimed at the beginner to intermediate writer who is beyond the JW phase. It is for someone who needs a guideline to build motivation and enforce consistency, especially for serial writers, and it works wonders for maintaining consistency. Many seasoned writers, such as Stephen King, submit to this school of thought all their lives. King famously said you need 4 to 6 hours of reading and writing every day to become a good writer.

“Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can’t expect to become a good writer.”

-Stephen King

However, JW and WPD have become trite advice in the contemporary scene. Like the infamous phrase “show don’t tell”, they are parroted by people who have not given serious thought to who the advice helps, what the advice means in practice, or what the implications of the advice may be. Ignorance is no sin. Remaining ignorant, however, is unacceptable.

JW cannot be parceled out to the intermediate-level hobbyist who wants to grow his skills. He will simply spin his wheels for years. WPD will not work for him either, as he has no reason to reach arbitrary word counts every day; that is not what he is asking for!

Likewise, WPD cannot be given to the advanced writer who knows that his problem is not consistency, but injecting energy and life into his words. JW will not work for him either, as he is struggling with a bigger problem than “Just Do It” can fix.

JW’s primary failure is its inability to guide an author in the right direction. It leaves a writer feeling aimless or unsure about the direction, even if he is a fully instinctive writer, and it leads to stories that also become aimless, bloated, and tangential. Discovery writing can be a very natural way to write, but what feels natural is not always good.

WPD’s primary failure is its restrictions. It is nothing more than a productivity check. For the serial writer, WPD is an excellent path to follow. It enforces consistency and ensures that the paychecks continue to roll in. However, over time, the quality of the work suffers. The brain sees WPD not as an exercise in creativity, but as a banal machination—something to endure and “churn out”, rather than create. For productivity, there is nothing like it, and for productivity’s sake, it is unmatched.

JW’s and WPD’s failings leave writers feeling too trapped or too tentative with their approaches to their work. They may flounder and not write for weeks, unsure of what next steps to take; worse, they may soullessly grind through their writing just to meet the wordcount goal. Suddenly there is no space for artistic liberty or discovery.

These trappings thus mandate a third, new approach to writing, one that utilizes the strengths of both while minimizing the failures. This third approach to writing is offered next, and while it, like WPD and JW, is not foolproof, it is useful and powerful for writers of all skill levels.

The third and new school of thought presented is called “scenes per day” (SPD). It emphasizes the completion of individual scenes as a metric of progress for the writer. It is more structured than JW but less structured than WPD. It is the Middle Path. It is not a fence-sitting or milquetoast approach to writing, but a dedicated and serious school of thought. In fact, it is so simple that it seems self-evident. First, however, the definition of a “scene” and the definition of “complete” must be explored so that way there is no misunderstanding.

A scene is any instance of time in which an action occurs. More restrictively, it is a function of continuous time where the characters and setting remain constant while something occurs. It can be as simple as a character entering a diner, sitting down, and observing the people in it. The scene is over when a server, say, his estranged mother-in-law, comes to take his order and recognizes him. Then, a new scene begins. A scene may go through many micro-changes over its duration, or it may have one continuous flow of action or dialogue that demands uninterrupted attention.

Completeness is the last actionable, writable thing before a change occurs. As in the above example, once the character enters the diner, one micro-scene is complete. Once he sits down, one micro-scene is complete. Once he stops observing people, one micro-scene is complete. On the macro scale, the scene is incomplete, yet still constructed of complete individual moments.

This bite-sized approach to scene construction seems obvious. Of course in action-driven prose, characters must complete actions or finish thoughts before the next can begin, and during interior monologue, thoughts naturally end and new ones begin. These small stops are completions on the micro scale as well. There is nothing new or complex about that. The definitions and examples may appear pedantic, but an understanding of exactly what “complete” means is critical to fully defining the SPD approach.

“Scenes per day is not a fence-sitting or milquetoast approach to writing, but a dedicated and serious school of thought.”

As said before, the aim of SPD is to focus on the completion of scenes. Like setting small, achievable goals, these incremental finish points enable a writer to see tangible progress as they work toward finishing their novel or short story. To call it a trick would be unfair, but essentially, it is. As with many things, setting smaller goals promotes feelings of accomplishment, which maintains motivation, promotes consistency, and prevents burnout. This can also enhance enjoyment and, in some extreme cases, reinvigorate passion for a once-loved art.

So, why does this scenes-based approach not work for WPD or JW?

JW has too little structure to benefit from a small goal accomplishment structure. To submit to JW is to accept that whatever you get out in a session is all that you are capable of producing in that session. JW has no aim, no finish line—where is the writer going but blindly ahead?

WPD has a similar structure to SPD. However, WPD is not structured by the act of writing itself, but by the amount of writing produced. Subconsciously, this puts the brain into productivity mode, where the goal is not to create art, but to write words, and that is no way to write. One would be better off penning service manuals, because at least that is guaranteed to pay.

Moreover, both JW and WPD have a side-effect where a writer feels as if he is always trying to “catch up” on his work, that he is always behind, that he is never writing enough to make up for the long road he has ahead. A man who feels he is behind long enough soon loses the will to fight, and merely limps along until his heart (and his love for his craft) gives out completely. This attitude is unhealthy and hampers creativity.

These feelings are eliminated by choosing to write scenes, not words. SPD benefits from the flexibility of JW’s freeness while allowing WPD’s structure to guide the writer correctly, without forcing him to stress over his progress (or lack thereof) or leaving him to “figure it out” when he is stuck with writer’s block. On his worst of days, he knows all that needs doing is one scene: a man coming into a store; a woman answering the phone; a child getting his bicycle from the garage. Just one scene is all he needs, and no word count is needed. Whether he writes 50 or 1500 words is of no significance. All he needs is just one scene. That is an accomplishment.

SPD’s power is that it takes the pressure off the modern writer’s need to compete, to succeed on social media and writing blogs, to keep up with an unsustainable modern literary output and speed. It forces a production-oriented writer to slow down, to moderate his activities and focus on the craft itself; it takes the hand of an aimless writer and gives him a foundation to build upon. Perhaps, most importantly, for the seasoned and the jaded, it reignites passion for the art by giving satisfaction and accomplishment where previously there was only a plateau of frustration.

Whichever school you fall into, for just one week, put aside all notions of “just feel it out” or “I must write 500 words today”. Forget productivity; it is mostly a trap, anyways. Aim for nothing more than writing just one complete scene per day. Write several scenes if the day is good. Write just one if the day is bad. Pick up your current novel or short story project and inch through it one scene at a time for one week straight. Or, start a new project and write it one scene at a time. The feeling of accomplishment and success achieved by SPD is far greater than that of WPD or JW, and once the school is adopted, you will find it very difficult to quit.

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