Visualizing 10 years of writing
Inspired by github’s activity graph I decided to aggregate all the words I’ve written since I started writing/blogging.
Almost since I started writing 10+ years ago I have been quite consistent with my format.
- I write in individual text files
- One file per session of writing
- Sometimes multiple files per day
- Write in Markdown format
- Label my files
YYYY-MM-DD--TITLE.md
I have written for many reasons:
- Multiple blogs including: professional blog, writing blog.
- Journaling
- Flash fiction
- Short fiction
- Sketches
- Multiple (incomplete) manuscripts
I also have started keeping track of my activity. I use many systems for tracking my work on a daily basis. Specially important when I’ve committed to any everyday project.
Key data
- Total word count: 715,580 words
- Filtered word count: 536,000 words (to remove noise from document tiles, comments, quotes, etc)
- Total days logged: 4,470 days
- Total days active: 922 days
- Longest continuos streak: 35 days
- Longest gap in writing: 467 days (it appears I didn’t write a word in 2011)
What does this all mean
Hard to put into words exactly what I felt seeing that graph and reading those numbers.
- I thought I had been more consistent. Honestly, before seeing the graph I would have said I wrote more days than not, and wouldn’t have noticed the big gaps the last two years.
- I thought I had written more. If a novel is roughly 100K words I have written the equivalent of 5 novels. But thing is, not all of that is fiction, I’d say half of it is non-fiction. So I’ve written less than 300K words of fiction rough, unedited and unpublished (for the most part).
- I’ve written for longer than I realize. On the other hand, although I haven’t been writing since I was a kid, I’ve pass the 10 year threshold. Still have a long way to go to write my first million words though.
What does all this work look like?
And here’s the graph in github’s green, because why not.
