Writing: Moving Beyond The Numbers

Average engagement time. Engaged sessions per user. New users. Returning users.

Tears blurred my vision as I looked at the Google Analytics on my computer screen. No matter how you calculated it, my blog was trending downward in every category. After a few more minutes of clicking around on the site, I put my head on the desk and allowed myself a good cry.

It was September and I had already been posting for seven months. When I’d begun the blog, I’d had visions of going viral and gaining masses of followers. I had worried about trolls and protecting my privacy—not empty comment boards and unopened newsletters.

My hopes for my writing were so high because I felt like it was all I had left of my career. My youngest daughter had been diagnosed with a rare progressive neurodevelopmental disorder. In what felt like the blink of an eye, I had gone from a writing specialist at a university to a stay-at-home special needs mom.

When I quit my job, I brushed off everyone’s concern, terrified they would see past my façade to the never-ending well of grief below. “Don’t worry,” I remember telling my parents, “I’ll just concentrate on my own writing instead.”

But the special needs parenting blog I had created wasn’t what I’d imagined. It was a pleasure to write, but the numbers never made any sense. Why was one post more successful than another? Why did some readers keep coming back while others didn’t? Why wasn’t it catching on like I had hoped?

That September, shoulders shaking with sobs, I gave myself an ultimatum: I would take a break from my blog for a full month, releasing myself from the pressure of weekly word counts and daily page views. Instead, I would use the time to think deeply about what I was doing with my writing.

In the month that followed, I began noticing things that hadn’t seemed important before. A friend with a special needs son told me my posts made her feel less alone. Family members seemed to understand our life better when they visited. When I reread my posts, I realized how much they were helping me pull meaning and purpose from my experiences.

By the end of my self-imposed writing sabbatical, I had come to a decision. I would continue posting but would stop allowing numbers to define me and my blog. Instead, I would focus on the qualitative side of things. Did I feel proud of myself? Was I making a difference to anyone? Did writing help me process the events in my life? Did my posts teach people about my daughter’s disease?

Several months later, I wrote a post about the concept of hope. At the end of it, I asked my small but now very loyal readership to donate to a fundraiser in my daughter’s honor. Fewer than thirty people did, but the amount of money they raised for a cure blew me away. By then, I knew enough not to concentrate on the number itself. Instead, I focused on the fact that my blog had made it happen.

There are so many things for writers to quantify these days: word counts, submissions, rejection letters, followers, sales, and contest entries. It’s tempting to fixate on these things and allow them to dictate whether I feel like a success or a failure. But I have found that if I move beyond the numbers, I often arrive somewhere worthwhile—a place where sitting down in front of a screen leads not to tears, but to smiles.