19 How Do I Assess My Writing?
Dana hadn’t thought much about her writing. She’d been so busy wrapping up each project only to dive into the next one that she hadn’t perceived any point in giving her writing some thought. Yet with the last project and then the current one on which she was working, Dana had suddenly felt stale, as if she was repeatedly writing the same thing without any new insight or greater growth. Dana had taken up writing because of her incessant intellectual curiosity, on the one hand, and her need to feel each day as if she were at least a little more skilled and accomplished, out of her ambition and effort, than the prior day. But Dana hadn’t had that feeling lately, and so it finally seemed a good time to take stock of her writing.
Assessing
How are you doing with writing? Do you even have any sense of where you stand with it? Perhaps you should. Taking stock now and then of your writing progress, the course that your writing has so far taken, and the growth in your interests and skills can help you steer yourself toward a better course, for more growth and greater inspiration. Don’t take stock every day. Instead, dive in writing every day. Relish each project, and attack assignments with the vigor and commitment that they deserve. Meet your daily and weekly goals, and enjoy the satisfaction and rewards that being in the game earns you. Don’t examine your writing too often or too closely, lest it lose its meaning in your analysis. Things may be working on you, in you, and for you that you don’t even know. But that’s also the point of periodic assessment, that you discern what might be going on with you and in you. Take a look under the hood now and then, and you may see that you need to tune the engine or even make a full motor swap.
Schedule
One way to ensure that you examine and evaluate your writing roles, career, growth, and progress is to do so on a specific schedule. As just suggested above, reflecting deeply on your writing shouldn’t necessarily be a daily practice. You’ve got writing to do. By all means, if you have a sudden deep insight into how you write, what you write, why you write, or what you should be writing instead, then capture it. Write things down as they occur to you, to evaluate later. But don’t let your musings distract you from productive writing. Instead, make a practice out of brief quarterly assessments and deeper annual assessments. Every ninety days or so can be a good time to take a quick look at what’s happened recently. Writing, like other jobs, can have daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms to it. Each day has a similar writing routine. Each week, broken up by weekend activities, has its own rhythm. Each month typically involves a new billing and budget cycle. You don’t need much retrospection within any of those cycles. But as the quarters roll over on April 1st, July 1st, and October 1st, spend a half hour looking over where you’ve been and where you’re headed. And then, when the New Year rolls around and you’re already looking ahead while looking back, take a deeper dive into where your writing has been that year and where it may or should be headed.
Tracking
Getting a perspective on your own writing, though, can be difficult if you’re not keeping track. You may have an intuited sense of where your writing stands. Listen to your intuition. But even for intuition to go to work, you can benefit from having something to observe and mull. To assess something, you first generally need to track, measure, and record it. You need data in front of you to examine and analyze. As you go through the motions of writing, be aware of the data that your activities are producing. Notice what you might observe, capture, organize, and record. Look for things from which you can draw patterns. Watch especially for things that you can measure, record, and in some way count or evaluate. As a writer, you have trained your awareness. To write, you must be conscious of things that you can consider and address, using thoughts expressed precisely with words. Turn that writer’s mind toward your own practices, course, and experience as a writer. Prepare to write a bit about your writing.
Journaling
You have options as to your methods of recording and analyzing your writing activities. Journaling is a writer’s natural option. Journals have at least two useful functions. If you write fleeting thoughts into a journal as they occur to you, you have captured data that you would otherwise forget or neglect. Start a journal about your writing. Keep it open or handy on your electronic desktop. Jot in it any deep insight that occurs to you, the moment it occurs to you, under the date. Every Friday at the end of the natural workweek, make a quick note in your writing journal of any insight you’ve gleaned from the week. Then, every quarter and annually, review your journal entries to draw broader and deeper insights. Highlight particularly valuable insights, including those that seem to echo through the quarter or year with related insights. Don’t delete any material, but instead strike through thoughts that you realize erred in some sense. Doing so gives you a clear record of what you surmised but later rejected or corrected. Make new entries at your quarterly and annual reviews, summarizing what you’ve learned. Following this structured, reflective, rigorous practice should give you a clear, consistent, and discerning perspective on your writing.
Spreadsheets
For prolific writers working on many projects across a year, spreadsheets can be a useful alternative or addition to journaling. When you have lots of data to track, a spreadsheet can be a good way to capture, organize, and analyze it. Writing projects produce quite a bit of information that is easy to categorize. Writing projects have authors, co-authors, clients, dates, word counts, titles, subtitles, formats, markets, genres, subjects, editors, publishers, reviewers, audiences, viewers, and sales, among other interesting features. Keeping a spreadsheet of your work with that information may soon reveal to you interesting and important patterns. Writing projects also have statuses. You may, for instance, have a vague thought of wanting to produce a certain type of writing or write someday on a certain subject. Vague thoughts may proceed to rough outlines, outlines to drafts, drafts to editing, editing to submissions, submissions to acceptances, and acceptances to publication. Keeping a spreadsheet of those categories of potential writings, works in progress, and works published can give you a much clearer sense of where you stand. It also enables you to return to projects at any time in whatever state or status they may be.
Measures
As the prior paragraph just suggested, the measures that you examine, record, and analyze have a lot to do with the insights and conclusions you may draw. The type and number of publications are examples. You may find, for instance, that your spreadsheet shows that you’ve written a lot more blogs but many fewer articles or essays than you thought, or more web content and fewer books. You may alternatively find that you’ve written a ton on the same subject or a limited category of subjects, or a lot for a certain audience but not much for another audience. You may also find that you’ve forgotten having written a piece for a certain premier journal but that you’ve written more than you’d care to admit for lesser journals. You may discern to your pleasant surprise that you’ve done more writing collaborations than you thought or, to your disappointment, fewer writing collaborations than you remember. The point is that the measures you record and track can show you patterns and opportunities that you either want to promote and pursue or instead correct and avoid.
Questions
Those inferences regarding patterns and insights, and their better or worse courses, are the sorts of questions you might want to investigate and answer in your periodic assessment of your writing. Consider what questions you might ask yourself about your writing. You might certainly want to consider the subjects on which you’ve written, whether too much or not enough of this or that thing. You might also want to consider your collaborations, pursuing more with skilled writers or fewer to focus on your own work. You might want to up your game as to the journals in which you publish, perhaps requiring changes in subjects, methods, or collaborators, or simply to diversify your writing into other journals. You may be ready to change or broaden the type of writing you do or the genres in which you write. You may realize that you’ve not yet attempted a genre in which you could be a strong writer and have substantial insight to share. You might notice that you have many more viewers, commenters, and sales in one area of your writing, and many fewer in another area, suggesting that you might want to focus more on the former area and less on the latter. You might also discern your strongest market and segment. You might also see, value, and embrace the publisher relationships that you have. Ask yourself what you want to discover about your writing, and then gather and analyze the data that would help you answer that question.
Patterns
As the prior paragraph just suggested, you can learn a lot about your writing from the patterns or trendlines in which you write. Look, for instance, for nests, bunches, and concentrations, where you’re writing a lot of one type and genre, on one subject, for one market, segment, and publisher. Bunches may be telling you something. Look also for gaps where you wrote some on a subject, in a genre, or for a publisher, but then nothing and then some again. Gaps may be telling you something. Look also for absences where you have written nothing of a certain type of publication, on a certain field with which you are familiar, in a certain genre for which you would have a natural aptitude, or for a certain market segment where you would know the audience. The absence of your writing in that area may be telling you something. Bunches, gaps, and absences aren’t the only type of pattern to discern. You may also see how categories are overlapping, integrating your work, and creating synergies. For instance, a certain collaborator may be keeping a door open for you to a certain publisher or providing you with stimulation and insight on a certain subject. A certain writing type or form for certain clients, say blogging for corporate clients, may be producing surprising income, while a certain subject across multiple writing types for multiple clients, may likewise be proving fruitful soil. Look for patterns around your writing.
Interpretation
To draw helpful insights from the patterns you discern in your writing, you need, though, to interpret those patterns. A lot of writing of one type and on one subject may, for instance, be a good thing, showing that you have developed a deep expertise and trusted voice. Some writers have established an editorial column in a certain journal addressing certain subjects and effectively milked the gig for years if not for decades. More power to them. Yet a lot of writing of one type on one subject may instead suggest that you are becoming a limited, one-trick pony, soon to be passed over in favor of the next great thing. Give the data its due interpretation, using your discernment, insight, intuition, and judgment. Similarly, gaps in your writing may suggest missed opportunities, on the one hand, or honest disinterest, on the other hand. Likewise, absences in your writing may indicate an overlooked opportunity to develop and display your skill, on the one hand, or a frank lack of skill or capacity, on the other hand. Again, don’t just notice things but also give the data its due interpretation.
Goals
When you assess your writing, you should also have your writing goals in mind. If, for instance, earning a living as a writer is among your goals, then you should be evaluating your writing income. If being a productive writer, staying in the publishing game, is among your goals, then you should be evaluating the number of your publications. If influence is among your writing goals, then you should be finding measures to prove your influence, whether in policy changes, citations by other authors, readership, or the like. If simple perseverance, having the opportunity to write with something to say, is among your goals, then you might focus on measuring and tracking your health, writing consistency, writing appetite, and general writing vigor. If writing growth is among your goals, then you might monitor the depth and breadth of your writing, including whether you are attempting and mastering multiple forms and genres, and publishing for different audiences through different publishers or journals. Make discerning your writing goals a critical part of your writing assessment, and then record and analyze measures equating to those goals.
Coach
If your own reflection over your writing doesn’t produce substantial insight, then consider recruiting a family member, friend, colleague, collaborator, or coach to help you glean greater insight. Don’t just ask your writing coach, what do you think of my writing? Instead, have specific questions in mind that your family member, friend, or other confidante can help you explore and answer. Try to articulate your writing goals to your confidante. That exercise alone may get you some helpful reactions, especially if the person with whom you speak knows you well. Listen carefully for any response or observation. The point isn’t to agree or disagree with your acquaintance who helps you examine your writing. The point is instead to hear their observations and see, over time, how those observations resonate with you or what they show you. The observations you get may not be apt. But even an awkward or inept observation may confirm for you that your own thinking is on the right track. Find someone who knows something about you or knows something about writing, or both, to help you take stock of your writing. It may be time for you either to simply press on or instead to make some significant changes.
Reflection
In what ways do you assess your writing? Do you journal, keep spreadsheets, or have another way of tracking your writing projects? How often do you think deeply about your writing, examining its progress and course? Do you reflect too much or too little on your writing? Do you keep any assessment schedule? Does anyone help you with your reflection over your writing, whether a family member, colleague, collaborator, or friend? Could you recruit someone to help you, especially someone who knows something about writing? Do you already know some of the patterns to your writing that you’d like to continue or instead like to adjust? Are you writing too much or too little on one subject, in one form, for one audience, or for one publisher? Do you know your writing goals against which you could measure your progress?
Key Points
Periodically assessing your writing can prompt fruitful insights.
Assess your writing progress quarterly and annually to keep on track.
Journal your insights about writing and then review your journaling.
Spreadsheets can help you track and analyze your writing projects.
Include in your monitoring as many material measures as you discern.
Consider questions that you’d like to investigate about your writing.
Look for bunches, gaps, absences, synergies, and other patterns.
Interpret usefully the patterns that you see in your writing.
Keep your growth, health, balance, insight, and perseverance as goals.
Recruit a family member, colleague, or coach to help you evaluate.