This year, I spent some of my Christmas and birthday money on a pedometer to help me lose the weight I gained this holiday season. Heading into the winter, I just started feeling famished, all the time. I wanted to eat constantly, and I just decided to go with it. It would give me a goal to work towards in the new year. So I gained about five pounds—not the end of the world, by any means, but I need to lose it now or I’ll be very unhappy with myself.

So I shopped around and read customer reviews and picked out the pedometer that seemed right for me. I came close to spending quite a bit more for one with software that would track my progress and create nifty graphs on my computer. I love graphs. After reading a lot of negative reviews of the software, though, I opted for the cheaper pedometer and decided to create my own graph on the computer myself. This is better, anyway, because I was able to modify it to meet my own set of goals.

I created a graph with two bits of data: daily step count and sweat points from the Just Sweat mode of my Just Dance games (make fun of me all you want; I owe a lot of lost weight to dancing video games, and I just think they’re so freakin’ fun). The graph is really helping me stay motivated. It makes me feel so excited to watch those two lines go higher and higher up each day.

Okay, but what does this have to do with writing? I realized that my love of graphs, the exhilaration I feel entering each day’s data and watching  the line go up, might help me get more motivated to write. I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting motivated to write lately. A lot of that has to do with depression—maybe I’ll talk about that some other time—but part of it is just that I have no momentum going. If I can find something new enough to make me feel excited about writing, I might be able to get my momentum up to the point where I no longer need a trick or gimmick to get going.

I set a writing goal for the month of February: to write every day, no matter how much, no matter on what. I copied and modified my activity graph to create a writing graph. It also has two sets of data to keep track of: number of words written on my novel and number of words written on stories. The goal will be to make sure I have something to plot on at least one of those lines every single day.

I know the lines will go up and down. That’s just the way it works—some days you have a lot to say, others, not so much. That’s okay because I believe the lines will show a gradual progression upwards throughout the month, if for no other reason than because I so, so long to see those lines getting higher and higher.