Writing Progress Tracker for Novelists

Good morning, all! I should be finishing the first draft of my novel today, which is pretty exciting! More exciting, however, is that I will have completed it in record time. I’ve written a few stories up to this point, but I continue to have a reoccurring problem. I’m horrendous at writing consistently and finishing my stories. Usually, I’ll think of a project, get really excited about it, commit to writing 1000 words a day, and then absolutely fail. I’ll write 1000 words on the first and maybe even second day, but by the third, I write 500 words at most. By the fourth day, I’m lucky to write at all. My story will then go untouched for 2 weeks before I regain the motivation to write and repeat the cycle. I’ve also noticed that around the 10k mark, my motivation really dips, and I start to not like my book. I’ve probably had a dozen projects that I’ve given up on at about the 10k mark because of this. After reading a piece of advice here, however, I committed to pushing through that 10k hurdle. A comment on some post said that writers have tons of experience writing the beginning of a story, but those that give up on projects have almost no experience in writing the ending. I realized that I fit this description, and so I committed to finishing my current project so that I could gain that experience. I trudged along writing my project. I still wasn’t really liking it. In fact, I even started to actively dislike it! Totally encompassed by a terrible story, which I was growing to loathe, my mind wandered. My mind thought of new projects that I could write. I came up with an idea in a totally different genre, and I started to get really excited. Here’s where the hard part comes in: I wrote the first page of that new project, and then, I committed to not writing any more of it until I finished the first draft of my current one. Since then, my writing productivity has boosted WAY up! In the past 2 weeks, I have written about 25,000 words. I only write Monday through Friday, so that breaks out to an average of 2500 words per writing day. None of this writing came from being motivated about my current project. It has all come from being tired of it, even to the point of wanting to delete it all, and wanting to start something else. Still, as I have written, I have grown to hate my current project…less. Now, at nearly the end of my first draft, I see glimmers of substance. I know that characters still lack depth, I rush through some scenes, more stuff needs to be added, entire portions need to be re-written, etc, BUT I can see how I can make it into something good if I ever want to. None of that would have happened if I just jumped projects when I lost motivation. So, I think I’ve found a system for finishing my stories and making them better: 1. Commit to finishing whatever I start to write 2. Actively think of exciting new projects and pick one to write when I’m finished with my current one 3. Let the excitement to write the new project drive the progress of the current one.