Do you remember when I used to blog? Ah, those were the days!
With the decline of the Google Reader and RSS feeds and as it became harder to balance my day job with my parenting responsibilities and my writing, it became more difficult for me to justify spending time on blogging. Each post would only get a few dozen hits, and so it made more sense to save those ideas, and that time, for my newsletter. (Which you can sign up for here, if you’re inclined.)
But I just finished drafting a book, and I realized that I have some interesting data, or at least some data that I found to be interesting. For my last three projects, I tracked my writing progress in spreadsheets, meaning that I can take a granular look at my productivity. What follows is a peek into my–wildly disparate and probably dysfunctional–writing process.
The first book in my data set is Bold Moves. This book started life as a proposal to be the follow-up to Chick Magnet in 2022. My publisher decided they wanted me to go a different way, but I knew that I wanted to write an angsty second-chance small town romance eventually. So the characters festered in the back of my head.
After Bad Reputation, I revised this proposal, shifting the focus from small town politics (the working title for the first proposal is Mr. Mayor) to chess, and I eventually sold my editor on the concept in the fall of 2023.
I drafted Bold Moves between January and May 2024. In that period, I clocked 58 writing days. The first draft weighed in at 94,665 words, yielding an average daily word count of 1632. But the range is WILD. My best day was March 19, when I wrote 3230 words. My worst day was April 28, when I only wrote 119 words.
Our second contestant is Super Secret Project #1. I first emailed a friend and described this book in December 2019, when I was still grappling with writer’s block. I ended up drafting it in three bursts, fitting it in between other (contracted) projects in summer 2022, May 2023, and winter 2024, with a few random days or weeks sprinkled in.
All told, I spent 54 days working on the first draft of this book, which was 83,164 words long. So my average daily word count was only 1433. My most productive day was December 1, 2024, when I wrote 2532 words. My worst? June 7, 2024, when I wrote just 78 words.
(More news on Super Secret Project #1 is forthcoming!)
Our third (and final) contestant is Super Secret Project #2. I emailed a friend to describe this idea in October 2024. I wrote a short proposal of about a thousand words that week. In the spring 2025, I expanded my mini proposal into a 3500-word version with character notes and a chapter outline.
I drafted this book between May 8 and July 3, 2025, and my first draft weighs in at 79973 words. I wrote for 46 of the 56 days in that period, averaging 1738 words a day. My single best day was May 14, when I wrote 2877 words, and my worst was May 23, when I only wrote 225 words.
So we have three books written in three wildly different fashions. Super Secret Project #2, my most recent first draft, was obviously my most efficient, but I only have limited pockets of time when I can write with such focus and abandon. I was averaging 4 to 5 hours a day on writing; it was A LOT.
Also writing that way–for me–requires having an incredibly detailed outline and little to no deviation from my plan. If things had started to go wrong and I had needed to rethink the characterizations or the plot, I never would’ve finished the first draft so quickly. In fact, of the two dozen books and novellas I’ve written, I’ve only managed to draft three of them in ~2 months (the other two being The One You Need and Earth Bound). It also helps that Super Secret Project #2 is the shortest of these drafts. It’s obvious, but fewer words means less typing.
The hardest of these books to draft was Super Secret Project #1 because every time I was forced to step away from it and return later, I had to find a way back into the head space of the book. As a result, I’ve had to do substantial revisions, and more are on the horizon. While I know why I had to approach this project the way I did, I would resist drafting in a spotty, patchwork manner again unless it was absolutely necessary.
Therefore the drafting process that’s most representative of how I do and should work is Bold Moves. But I would caution that staying focused on a draft for five months is almost as difficult as blasting one out in two months.
It’s also interesting to me that I only logged a single 3000 word+ day over these three projects. While I aim for 2000 words a day, I don’t always hit that. And I never, ever manage to write every day, not even when I have periods when I can write more or less full time. Slow and steady (with days of rest) really does win the race, at least where my productivity and creativity are concerned.
And my final takeaway is that writing is hard. It just is. But I’m still riding the high of having finished another book.
If you’re a creative writer, what does your process look like? What lessons have you learned about how to hack your brain and do your best work?
Emma Barry 
Thanks for sharing your process. I appreciate the level of planning that you have shown here. It also highlights to me why I don’t progress (other than the job and the caring responsibilities)- maybe I too need to keep a WIP spreadsheet.
It’s an interesting conundrum because at times in my career, tracking my progress might have been counterproductive. I might, in other words, have felt guilty about what I wasn’t getting done, which in turn might have made it harder to get anything done, lol.
So if tracking your progress helps–and these days, I do find that it helps me–then YAY. But if it adds anxiety, then it might be a hindrance.
I am anxious at my lack of progress. Trying a new system may be the too to help me move forward on my current acadmic writing draft. Thank you for your insights.