Do Excel and creativity go together?

One of the chapters of Jeff VanderMeer’s excellent Booklife talks about creating boundaries within which your creativity can thrive. As a younger writer I was very resistant to the core of this concept. As a younger human being I was too. I was never one who took notes, or kept a calendar, or anything of the sort. I was creative, head in the clouds, disorganized, random, and I liked it. I’d rather miss turning in a paper than keep a freaking appointment book while in school.

I still remember the first time I caved on these principles. My senior year of college saw the school switch from quarters, which saw me having to track 3-4 classes at a time, to semesters, which saw me tracking 5-7. I remember ripping the pages off my syllabus with due dates off and using a shoe and thumbtack to nail all seven to the back of my dorm room door so I’d see them all every day when I left the room.

Since then I’ve become a todo list user (using a writer-modified version of GTD), calendar believer, PDA fan, and user of databases and spreadsheets to organize information.

What I found out, was that as someone who doesn’t naturally have a sharp memory for minutia, was that I could freely focus on tasks at hand (writing stories, etc) since my outboard brains collected all the fiddly stuff. In fact, I could keep a good handle on a project of complexity using these tools. So when I wrote my first novel, using the same hierarchal list organizer I used for todo/project management (Omni Outliner) ended up giving me the freedom to play without worrying about the larger structure. That was already planned out in rough sketch form and color coded by POV. I could focus on the chapter at hand.

Likewise, in order to understand how fast I’m writing, how much time a novel will yet take to write, I kept a word log. I wanted the daily word log to show me how much I wrote a day, variances in the day, when I wrote best, etc etc. Eventually that turned into an Excel sheet that I create for each novel that has a chart that gives me a visual on all the data, allows me to see how fast I’m writing, when I’ll maybe finish the book, and so forth.

When I mentioned this on twitter yesterday, people were interested. So I removed some columns, tidied the sheet up, and have it online for those who’re curious about how I track the wordcount of a novel. All you have to do is click the picture here on the right of the spreadsheet to play around with it.

Filed under the topic Journal on October 24th 2009 at 12:07 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.