Writers and word counts

Some writers post their daily word count on their blogs. To me that seems both weirdly intimate and completely uninformative, but maybe that's because I do not manage to generate anywhere near as many words as these people tend to. Word counters don't seem to post things like "15", "121", "0", "0", "erased everything I wrote last week and then threw up"--they post robust and intimidating numbers instead.

It's not that I don't track my word production. I do. I even (to be weirdly intimate in my own way) graph moving averages, etc. as a way of making sure I'm keeping my pace up.

But that number, while not completely meaningless, is quite misleading. I generally write a lot, and then spend a lot of time rewriting, cutting, rewriting, cutting. I don't usually throw up, but that would not be out of place. So for me that word production number is more "wheat seed sown" rather than "baked loaves of bread delivered". In the current credit environment, no one is lending me money against that.