How to Track Your Writing Progress

Tracking your writing progress can be a difficult task. Many writers think that if you track your word count, then that's enough. After all, if the word count is going up, it means your book is being written, right?

Well, yes but also no.

Any approach you take to writing your novel will cause the word count to go up. I always thought it's better not to think about the word count and instead focus on the quality of what you're writing and how accurate it is to your story. You will have enough words at the end of the day, that's not the important part.

It's important for your mental health and for editing, later on, to know which stage you're up to and how long it took you to get there.

Start with a novel progress tracker

When you're penning your latest novel draft, it's important to track each step in the process and how long that stage took you. Visually and categorically seeing that researching notes took you 3 months (when you thought it would take 3 weeks) helps you to plan more realistically and not beat yourself up.

Take the example of writing your first draft. You might set out and say, "I will focus on completing the first draft of my novel" -- but what exactly goes into completing the first draft? For historical fiction writers, it starts with researching key bits of information, then compiling those notes and sifting through what is useful for your novel.

The next step is to start writing chapters 5 - 10 (because that's where you got stuck) and finally, you need to think about how to wrap up the story at the end. What started as one simple step "finish my first draft" actually snowballed into 10 little tasks.

In the past, for me, it was easy to get discouraged. I would set out to accomplish a big goal without realizing how long this would really take me. I wasn't tracking anything, so what seemed to take a "long time" actually only took me 2 weeks but because I didn't know that, I was much harder on myself.

When I started tracking my novel progress, I realized that some tasks were actually quite quick to finish (even if it was a painful slog) and some took longer than I thought.

Download a writing goal tracker

I started using Notion to help me with tracking my writing goals this year and let me tell you, it changed my life! I can now categorically see how long certain tasks take me, and I get that sweet feeling of accomplishment when I actually work towards my goal.

I created this writing goal tracker that you can download for free here that includes a goal date to finish and the actual finish date (so you can see if your expectations and planning are accurate or not). There's even a column where it shows you how many days it took to finish!

Tracking your progress towards completing your novel is such an essential part of the writing process. It's great to get motivation to write from quotes, or to make writing a consistent habit, but until you track your writing progress, the effort you put in will never feel like enough. Our brains are not very good at keeping track of how consistent we have been.

I learned this the hard way and constantly felt discouraged, even if I was making good progress! This year, however, I learned the value of tracking habits in Atomic Habits by James Clear and honestly, I'm never going back to my non-tracking days.

Let me know how this tracker is working for you, and how keeping track of your progress is helping you complete your writing projects.