#writing: creative audit

A while ago I discovered daytum – an online dashboarding system that lets you track, simply and quickly, just about anything you can think of. Figuring I was about due for some creative procrastination, I got to applying daytum to my writing habits.

I thought it might be interesting to look back at the stories I have on file – pretty much everything I have written since about 2002 – and look for some common characteristics. What I found was a less than spectacular summation of my creative energies, with some surprising trends. So let’s get this going.

36! How have I written so little over such a long period of time? 36 pieces averages out to a little over four a year – and there were some bumper years during that spell. My more recent productivity is probably a lot lower.

On the good side, I tracked down all my rejections and acceptances and the ratio was pretty healthy – my last rejection more than a year ago and my acceptances out weighing my rejections by three to one. Mind you, with my total submissions at just eight, that’s nothing to write home about.

Much less healthy was my ratio of male to female main characters. I’m not sure if this is something I should be ashamed of, or if it’s just part and parcel of being a male writer. I don’t think I go out of my way to avoid writing female main characters, but it does indicate a fairly restricted point of view.

What I did find promising was that the majority of those nine female characters were written in the last three years. So at least I’m evening things up as I ‘mature’.

In terms of genre, sci-fi and ‘literary’ came out as my genres of choice. Mind you, I have a fairly loose definition of literary. I used to write sci-fi by default, but the last 2 years has been mostly literary. There was a brief period in university where I entertained the idea of being a children’s writer, but the dream faded quickly after some pretty convincing rejections.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I opted for past tense twice as much as present.

When I counted up the perspective used in my fiction pieces I was surprised to find that I’d written more second person stories than first person. They say second person is the hardest perspective to get right, so kudos to me for giving it a crack with some success; two of my six accepted pieces were written in second person.

I’ve tended to shy away from first person the older I’ve got – It’s been more than six years since my last attempt. Which makes me wonder why I’m attempting a first person novel.

What’s the point?

Writing can be a thankless apprenticeship at times. Progress is slow and ambiguous. Once finished, a successful (or failure) submission is quickly forgotten. It’s as if there exists an authorly intertia that drives us on whilst at the same time obscuring the rearview mirror.

Daytum reminds me of where I have been. It not only offers a handy visual representation of progress, daytum assists in tracking the overall arc of my writing, revealing habits and characteristics I might otherwise have ignored.

With so few stories under my belt, and no full length manuscripts tracked, the insights gleaned from this exercise are quite lean. But over time I’m hoping that the trends will become more obvious, the insights more useful.

It may be just pixels and numbers, but punching in a submission update is immensly satisfying, particularly when it resets my “time since acceptance” back to zero.

You can see my full daytum profile at daytum.com/markwelker

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