Since returning from my vacation I’ve been ramping up again with steady drum beat to get my story done. A scene or two per day, as usual. With the steady output, someone asked me today how many scenes I’ve rendered in prose. The answer? I don’t know. When I’m blocking out scenes, I do count them out. Somewhere between fifty and sixty makes up a good visual, Hollywood style story. It’s nice to know where I am while I’m plotting.

As I’m rendering the scenes, I really don’t want to know how many I’ve done or how many I have left. Why? I don’t know, it makes me anxious. I guessed today, and I think I’ve got fifteen, or maybe twenty scenes done. But I really don’t know, and I’m afraid to look.

It’s like watching the clock all day. The more you look at the clock, the more slowly the time passes, and the longer things seem to take. You’ll swear it was two hours and it’s only been twenty minutes. That kind of thing is agonizing, and it happens to me when I write. I always feel like I’ve made more progress than I really have. And then I look at the mountain of work in front of me and get discouraged.

Because of this, I try to do the smart thing and just ignore how many scenes I’ve written out of my fifty or sixty. How will I know? When there aren’t any left to write. Or when I start to notice that there’s only a few more left. That’ll be good enough for me. Til then I’ve got the blinders on, and it’s just write, write, write.

It’s an added bonus of breaking your writing job down into scenes — you don’t really have to think about the bigger picture anymore. It’s time to put your nose to the grindstone and just crank that puppy out. I’ve created a nicely compartmentalized system here. It’s not that different from the specialization you see on an assembly line. You get more consistent output when one person does one task, over and over and over. It’s something Henry Ford and other early manufacturers figured out. A job takes longer, and is done to less consistent quality when the person has to switch tasks from one thing to another. It’s an unnecessary interruption.

When I’m plotting and blocking scenes, that’s all I may be doing for months. That’s the time for all the measuring, and planning. When it’s time to write, the only thing I’m doing is writing. Nothing else is my concern right now. When I’m done, I’ll be looking at the story I’ve got and deciding what to change and what to cut. Then I’ll polish up the scenes that need work, or rearranging.

The point is, I don’t keep score because it defies the point of my focus right now. How many scenes I’ve written isn’t important. The fact I pump out a scene or two per day is the important thing.

Keep score when keeping score is important, not when it distracts you or disrupts your productivity.