I’m taking on a new writing project – posting once a day on this blog this year – and, naturally, the first thing I open when i start a writing project – after Word or Ecto, to write the text – is Microsoft Excel, to track what I’m doing. Maybe that’s a sign of my so-called “left brain analytical tendencies” (NOTE: the left brained / right brained nonsense is a MYTH, used here for entertainment value only); after all, Quentin Tarantino once said “you can’t write poetry on a computer” and I doubt he spins up Excel on his yellow notepads. But a lot of successful cartoonists I know, like Bill Holbrook of Kevin and Kell, got their start on their most successful projects by getting an inventory – a month or two of backlog that they could use to prevent themselves from getting behind, and the only way I know to get that far ahead is to actually track what you’re doing.
It’s been a useful exercise so far. I found about half dozen old blog posts that never got posted (some quite stale now) and found many other ideas popping to mind just by writing them down. I also realized the limits of my Excel-fu, as the nice diagrams I generate for my Nanowrimo progress are actually the outcome of a lot of careful tweaking which I can’t easily replicate quickly.
But the exercise is really helpful. Just like all the other things in my life I’ve gotten more disciplined about tracking – my Nanowrimo progress, my word count, my short stories, my TODOs, my office piles – I’ve found great benefits come quickly, and it brings clarity, focus … and a great feeling of relief when you hit Save and are one more unit ahead of the onrushing wolf.
-the Centaur
