A number of the academics I follow on Twitter have spent the past week telling their followers about their writing. But they’ve been doing it in a way that’s quite different from the way I typically talk about my writing. Whereas I might mention the broad topic of a paper or book chapter, these people are talking about the number of words they’re producing every day.

It’s all part of a new virtual writing group, one that encourages faculty members to write at least 200 words every day. The idea, from Erin Templeton in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker section, is this:

The Rule of 200 works like this: my document word count must increase by 200 before I am done for the day, no exceptions. 200 words is a modest goal. It isn’t even an entire page of double-spaced 12pt font. It’s a grocery list, an email, a series of text messages; it’s a lot shorter than most of my ProfHacker posts (this one included). Sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to write 200 words. Sometimes it takes all day long. But no matter what, before my head hits the pillow for the night, the word count is +200.

This sort of thing has been tried before by various contributors to the Chronicle. As Templeton points out, some have suggested writing for the first thirty minutes of your morning or producing 750 words a day. So, now, the word count has dropped — as well as the amount of time it might take — and, thereby, the barriers that might prevent faculty members from actually completing drafts of papers.

All of this raises several interesting questions:

1. Should we strive to write 200 words a day, even when we don’t have anything particularly thoughtful to put down on the page?
2. Does thinking about writing in this way take some of the creativity out of the endeavor?
3. Am I looking for excuses for not writing instead of just sitting down and knocking out my 200 words for the day?

Personally, I’ve never really cared about the word count of a document as I’ve been writing it; I’ll check the count once I’ve completed a draft because some journals are particular about length and won’t publish something if the word count is too high, but otherwise it doesn’t really interest me to know how many words are in a paper I’ve written.

But I’m also someone who hasn’t ever really had a problem getting words out of my brain and onto the page. In fact, I often joke that I can’t say anything in fewer than thirty pages. And those who know me know that — once I’m ready to write — I can knock out a paper that’s in good enough shape to be shared with colleagues in about two weeks. In that sense, I’m pretty lucky.

The operative phrase here is clearly “once I’m ready to write.” I genuinely believe that writing — of any kind — is a creative process. I wake up some mornings and feel like I’ve got a lot of interesting things to say; on those days, I sit down and write (often three or four pages). I wake up other mornings and have nothing at all to say. I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll simply say it this way: I write when the spirit moves me.

While I know I’m not writing poems to rival Pablo Neruda, I feel that I’m definitely engaged in the same activity; I choose my words carefully and I think for a long time about how best to get my ideas across to others. If I’m to be successful as an author, it’s not just the ideas that have to be compelling, it’s also the way that I organize them.

And so I’m not joining the word count club, whether it’s 200, 750, or any other amount. If I don’t have something to write on a particular day, I’m not going to force words onto the page in order to reach an artificial goal. Some days, I know I’ll end up with a great deal more than 200 words; other days, I know I’ll end up without a single word. It might take me a little longer to finish a draft if I do things my way than it would if I wrote something every day, but I’ll feel better about the finished product.