All those (private) words

Even though I haven’t been writing in public, I’ve still written 58,000 words this year [0]. But those words haven’t been public; they’ve been in Day One, a journaling app I use on my iPad and Mac.

All this writing, only for me. A hundred words here, a few hundred there. What is it doing for me? Am I any better as a writer? I judge I’m a little worse than I was a few years ago. I think that’s because I’ve been writing for myself, and all those words are first drafts, never subject to revision or critical thinking.

On the other hand, they’ve kept me in the habit of writing. Any writing is better than no writing. And I will probably mine some of those words and revisit them here.

[0] I’ve been very prolific in my journal in the last year. I have entries in Day One going back four years; 124,000 words in all. So 58,000+ words in 2014 is 46% of the total.