2024 was a year of transition. I moved to working only one job and started to focus back on my writing. I didn’t get as much done as I would like, but more than I was expecting.
I started tracking my writing in July to see if I could find patterns to make me more productive. I have a “Year at a Glance” calendar that hangs on my office whiteboard, and each day I wrote down how much work I accomplished. I used color coding to track what type of writing: black for time spent drafting and word count, and red for editing.
All of that means I know how much time I spent writing and how many words I drafted in the second half of this year. I’ll talk about how this effects my goals for 2025 in a moment.
Planning
I did not track how much time I spent planning. It would be difficult to quantify acurately, since I spend a lot of time going over ideas and scenes in my head, but I will come back to this in my future goals.
Drafting
This year I spent 53.25 hours drafting. I’m defining that as the writing of the first draft of a scene. I wrote 111,014 words while drafting.
Editing
I spent 43.5 hours editing. That includes content editing (the large level scene changes) as well as line edits (selecting the right word or phrasing). I didn’t track how many words I added or removed, so I don’t know how many total words I really wrote this year, but that doesn’t bother me.
2025 Goals
4 Drafts, 2 Novels
My goal for 2025 is to plan and write 4 drafts, and then edit at least 2 of them to ‘finished’ novels. Seeing as most of the 111,014 words I drafted were in just 2 months of the 6 that I tracked, it seems reasonable that I could draft about 360,000 words in a full year.
As for editing, 2 full novels seems a reasonable number. I already have 2 drafts ready to edit or I could use a draft I complete later in the year.
Both of these goals double what I accomplished in 2024, but still seem doable with my current workload.
Documentation
I am pleased with my current system of tracking my writing. In 2025, I would like to track the time I spend planning. Obviously I cannot quantify the time spent thinking, but I will include outlining, character bios, and more. This will be marked on my calendar in purple.
Writer’s Group
I was part of a writer’s group at my church that unfortunately started in the fall of 2019. I would like to connect with more writers this year and am going to work at restarting the group.
What are your writing goals for 2025? Let me know below so we can encourage one another in our creativity.