By default, I’m a pretty competitive person. Put me in front of a board game with my husband and sister and brother-in-law, and I will try to tear it up in the winner’s circle (mostly, though, I just want to beat my husband). It’s not about proving my worth or declaring I’m best; it’s just something ingrained in my personality—doing my best at whatever I try.
This inherent characteristic can come back to bite sometimes when I sink into the comparison game. I start thinking I’m the one losing, because that person over there is so much more successful and doing so much better at building their audience than I am. There must be nothing left for me. Maybe I should just quit playing the game. Maybe I should find something else to do. Maybe I should stamp “Just not for me” on a silly dream.
When I fall into this black hole, I have to work hard to climb back out. I have to work even harder to convince myself that the only competitions we have is ourselves.
The only person we’re competing against is the person we were yesterday. The only writer we’re competing against is the writer we were last week, and the way to win this game is to improve day by day, week by week, month by month. That means getting better at word counts, at our writing technique, at the schedule we keep that maximizes all the hours we have in the most effective way we can.
There is no room for us to look at some other writer’s word count and think, “I must not be playing this game right, because he’s beating me by 10,000,” because the only writer whose word count we should be worried about is our own. Are we writing more words this week in the time we had than we wrote last week? Are we writing more efficiently today than we did a month ago? Are we expressing our ideas more clearly than we did a year ago?
Then we’re winning.
What I have to often remind myself is that we’re not playing against each other in the writing world. We’re all on the same team. And if we think we’re not, then we’re not going to make many friends in this business. And I may be a little biased, but I think writers are some of the coolest friends ever.
Some of my favorite people are the writers who so generously give away their tips and tricks for producing more words or helping me get to the next step of my career, who know and understand that we are not in competition with each other.
This can seem like a revolutionary concept, that there is no real competition, because don’t we all share products in this digital world that is overfilled with content?
Well, maybe I’m just idealistic, but I like to think that if a reader is paying attention to one writer, they will be more interested in paying attention to other writers, too. It doesn’t mean that my audience can’t become your audience or that your audience can’t become my audience. There are so many people in this world. There are enough to go around.
Let me say that again: THERE ARE ENOUGH TO GO AROUND.
There will always be someone, somewhere, who could learn something from you. There will always be someone who will find value in what you say. There will always be someone who will love you and your work.
If we can’t seen one another as fellow friends and colleagues along the journey toward lending the world beauty with our words, then we will miss out on the beauty of community. It’s in community that we become who we were made to be.
So compete with yourself. It’s a better-matched competition anyway.
How to compete with yourself:
1. Keep detailed logs of your word counts.
Lately I’ve been keeping logs of how many words I write for each of my projects and tallying them up at the end of every day. I’ve only done this for a couple of weeks, but I’ve steadily been adjusting my work and increasing my word counts, and this is super helpful as a writer with very limited time.
That said, some weeks we will obviously write more words than others. Those weeks we log 39,000 words are followed by a week with only 20,000 words, but that doesn’t mean that we are stalling (or moving backward) in our improvement. I try to think in terms of rough draft and final draft words. Rough draft words are easier to crank out. Final drafts take a little more time and effort. So keep track of both, and see if you’re getting better at each.
2. Learn all you can about this game.
I’m always reading books on structure and plot and characterization and business, because I believe that if we’re not always getting better, then we’re just getting stale. We should always pursue resources that will make us better writers, whatever that looks like in our lives. Compete against other weeks in how much you learn.
This is strategy. We can’t win against who we used to be if we’re not always trying to learn more and grow into better writers.
3. Set your own goals, without worrying about anyone else’s.
The reality is that your journey is your own personal journey. Maybe you have two kids. Maybe you have five. Maybe you work a full-time job. Maybe you’re doing writing full-time. Maybe you just got married. Maybe you live alone. All of those factors affect how many words you can write in any given week. So set your own word count goals, and don’t worry about anyone else’s. At the end of a week, assess how you’re meeting your goals and whether they need to be adjusted and how you feel about them (because if we’re stressing ourselves out with our goals, then they aren’t really effective goals at all).
4. Keep a writer journal.
I write in a writer journal most nights, or at least most writing nights (I don’t write on the weekends. It’s my family time). I write about how writing felt today, what I’m learning, things I really want to improve on and how I might turn those weaknesses into strengths. Sometimes I even work out plot lines in a less-formal way. I only write about 200 or 300 words every night, but those words have been great for helping me remember ideas and work out problems and analyze how that particular word count goal made me feel a little too stressed that week. Writer journals help us keep records we can refer to for years and years. I find this helpful.
