John of MindonFire.com recently equated word count to XP (that’d be eXperience Points in gaming parlance, not the Microsoft product.) I loved the idea of writing as part of a game, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Personally I’m still kind of fixated on time as a measure of progress – not time dicking around on Facebook when I’m supposed to be writing, of course, but the actual time I spend working on a story in some capacity.

So what if your max XP was ten thousand hours. What’s the level cap? Let’s say it’s 20. That’s 500 hours per level.

I wonder what level I am, how many hours I’ve put in over the past seven years.

Today I went over all of the projects that are on my mind right now, the things I am doing and want to do in the next few months. I decided to do work estimates on them, just for kicks, to see how many hours it would take to get them done, but also to see how many hours I’d get out of it toward that goal of ten thousand.

I came up with about 225 hours.

The sheer number of them was a little overwhelming and I needed to prioritize them.That was hard, until I started looking at them in terms of what part of ‘my writing’ they affect. I came up with categories, and then it all fell into place. Here is the result:

(A larger, more legible version can be found here.)

Those categories are New, Public, Career, and Commitments. The Commitments column is for my volunteer stuff. I have three different organizations I do stuff for now. I never know when it’s coming or how much time it will take until it’s been assigned, but once it’s been assigned it always takes priority.

So what with the day job, kids, social life, and sleep, I think I will probably need until March to finish all of that.

I also plugged everything into Klok, and made sub-projects out of each of the things that need to happen before I can call any one of my index cards ‘complete.’ If this all seems like making too much work out of it, I can assure you, this isn’t work, it’s fun. I need to see progress, because I don’t feel it. All around me my writing friends are succeeding in ways that I am not – that’s just part of the deal, and I don’t begrudge them a moment of it, but I need a way to keep myself buoyed on the hard days, because the hard days come.

I figure if I get to ten thousand hours and still haven’t sold anything, then I can give up. Fortunately that is a long way away.

*This was the old EverQuest verbiage whenever you gained a level in a skill. Not quite the same thing as leveling your character, but the wording always amused me. I am seriously considering adding an XP bar at the bottom of the cork board. Everything up there doesn’t quite gain me half a level. :)

So, what about this:

You’ve heard that whole “the first million words are crap” thing, right? I read a corollary to that recently, that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything.

That’s a lot of hours.

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a Story-a-Week project for a long time now, and I can never quite bring myself to do it. It feels like setting myself up for failure, because I can never predict with any kind of accuracy how long something is going to take to be done. Like right now, I’m editing “They Are Living Still” and I’m trying to fix one paragraph. It’s a bad paragraph: all tell, no show, totally out of the blue and doesn’t flow with the story where it is but contains important information. I have to put that information somewhere, and I have to do it in a better way, but right now I’m stuck. And I don’t know how long it will take to fix it. So “done” is completely unpredictable right now, and if I say “I have to have it done in a week,” and then it’s not done, I have failed.

(I realize that if I ever intend to get a novel “done” I will simply have to overcome this, because novelists work to deadline.)

So Story-a-Week may not be for me.

But a Ten Thousand Hours Project… maybe.

Lifehacker recently posted about a personal time-tracking tool called Klok. I downloaded and checked it out. It’s slick. I like it. It’s got me thinking.

I have no idea how many hours I’ve put into being a writer so far. I’ll ignore everything before 2002, because that was when I really decided to put some sweat into it and learn something. And what exactly goes into learning to write, anyway?

Word count, of course, but just making words without any kind of input or seeking out the knowledge of people who do it better would just result in a consistent level of crap, with maybe a slight trend upwards over a very long period of time. So the learning needs to count. Learning comes from a number of places: reading writer’s blogs, articles, and books on writing, going to workshops and critique groups, reading fiction and noticing what works and what doesn’t. Editing my own work counts. How about the time spent researching markets, and preparing submissions? Does that count too? What about this blog, where I take stock of what I’m doing right and wrong, and hang it all out there for you good people to see?

10,000 hours is a long time. I would be retired by then, (I hope,) which means it can’t be a real goal. A goal that takes decades to reach isn’t something I can really handle. But it can certainly be a standard to rally to.

Still thinking about it.