Measuring Writing Quality

Last week, I read the book  Marketing for Writers Who Hate Marketing: The No-Stress Way to Sell Books Without Losing Your Mind by James Scott Bell. It's the next book club read for the Insecure Writer's Support Group on Goodreads. Although it offers the usual advice about websites, mailing lists, ads, and other traditional marketing tools, Bell puts writing quality first. In fact, he not only suggests you focus on improving parts of your writing craft such as plot, character, dialogue, voice, and theme (there were a couple of others mentioned; I think setting was one, but description oddly wasn't), but he recommending setting goals of improving them by a set percentage every year. That was the part that really got my attention.

At my day job, we set Key Performance Indicators that are measurable--say, getting a certain score level on an audit, or updating/reviewing all documents in our quality system every year. I'm not sure how you would measure improving your plotting by 10% every year. Adding more plot twists? Spending more or less time on plotting? Getting feedback from beta readers, editors, and readers? Bell is supposed to answer question from the Goodreads group, so I should submit this question and to see what his answer is.

One of Bell's other suggestions is for something much easier to track--writing quantity. While many other people have recommended tracking your daily word count, this book finally pushed me into setting up a simple spreadsheet to track mine. My minimum is 500 new words every day, while targeting 1000. Tracking my word count does motivate me to maintain better focus during my writing sessions. It worked well until the weekend, as I was busy all day Saturday bringing Alex to and from a party, grocery shopping, baking three loaves of bread, making two pizzas, and cooking another dish for the week. By the time I had a chance to write, I was physically and mentally drained. Sunday we were at the Renaissance Faire until late, so the only writing I'll do is whatever I can manage after I finish this post.

Before I head off for another writing session, I'd like to ask what you think about measuring writing quality. Can it be done, or, as in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, must we leave quality undefined? Do you track your daily word count? If so, do you find it helpful? Feel free to answer in the comments.

Do You Value the Goal or the Process?

Yesterday, I read an article called, "The Most Important Question of Your Life." According to the author, you shouldn't ask yourself what you want out of life, but rather what you choose to suffer to achieve your goals. No goal worth achieving can be reached without effort, often requiring more effort than is apparent when someone first chooses to pursue a goal. There can be physical or psychological pain experienced over and over before someone succeeds. Even then, you may be required to put in effort to maintain your goal, whether that goal is staying at a healthy weight or keeping a relationship strong. I think the author makes some valid points, but I think there's more to reaching a goal than enduring pain and suffering. The bumps are part of the journey, and while it's always important to keep a goal in mind, one has to accept the journey, even learn to enjoy it, to reach the goal.

One of my favorite all-time books is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's a passage in there where the author talks about trying to climb a mountain but giving up due to exhaustion. Physical strength and intellectual motivation weren't enough. To quote at length:

He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take....[The ego-climber] rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be further up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

In other words, if you want to write a book, earn a degree, or accomplish something, you have to value getting there as much as achieving the end goal. Of course, different people have different tolerances and so may therefore need to take different journeys. I don't enjoy running so would never set out to run a marathon. However, I do enjoy the process of researching stories, developing plots and characters, and putting in a day's work on a manuscript, so I can achieve my goal of writing a book. Someone else may be able to run a marathon but loathe having to sit at a computer and write all day.

  What do you think? Does success in reaching a goal depend on accepting setbacks along the way, recognizing the value of the journey, both, or something else? Do you think this could be part of the reason why so many books include a journey as part of reaching a goal? Feel free to share your thoughts below.