Who’s Counting?
Of the myriad ways to measure your productivity as a writer, one of the most straightforward and objective is your word count. It’s also a significant metric for classification and marketing of your work, because different genres and formats each have their own traditional sweet spots. And it just feels great to tell people that your novel is more than 100,000 words, because they react as it that means it’s good. Perhaps the reaction is more properly construed as, “You must take all this very seriously,” or, “Wow, you really don’t have much of a life.” But it feels good all the same.
The danger of obsessing about word count, of course, is if the writing’s no good you’re just generating more of something no one will want. Your focus should always be on quality, not quantity. In fact, using fewer words is often a hallmark of stronger writing. Brevity is the soul of wit, or so it’s said. (Clichés count double!)
We recently celebrated the completion of the first draft of our new novel, which we accomplished faster than any of the previous ones. Practice makes perfect (remember to double that one, too) but a big part of the reason might have been Kent’s drive to “win” the word count. His claims of victory look reasonable on the surface, but he’s neglecting to include the words in the stubs, all of which go in Jen’s total.
People working together toward a common goal aren’t supposed to be competing with one another, yet they often are. If it produces conflict in the partnership, or if you’re taking the batteries out of each other’s keyboards, then it becomes counterproductive. But up to a point, some good-natured rivalry can be highly motivating. That’s how Kent sees things anyway. He knows if he can keep up with Jen he has something to feel proud of. Working by yourself, you have no one to set the pace.
How do you measure your progress? What makes you feel energized about writing?
I just checked – the word count total for the stubs is 37,431, which does include a couple of scenes we decided we didn’t need to actually write for real.
I think within the manuscript proper I ended up about 10k ahead of you, so really you blew me out of the water.
Kneel before Zod.
From here on out, it will get really tricky to keep track of individual word counts. We’ll be editing each other’s sections, adding and removing lines and paragraphs.
And I’m sure that your words were, on average, 1.5 times as long as mine, so that should count for something.
My fondness for sesquipedalian terms is well known.
Tee hee.
Word count is crucial for me, as a solo writer in terms of gaging progress on a first draft. I tend to throw everything at the page, which means that when it comes to edits there is a ton of chiseling for me to do. I’m curious as to how some of your other readers approach it.
So, Reggie, do your projects tend to shape up the same way? Do you know that, say, for every 1000 words you write in the first draft, you’ll end up with 750 by the time you’re done editing? Or is it not that predictable?
Hmmm. It’s not always predictable. Short stories are harder for me to predict in terms of word count loss than novels, however. I remember a long time ago in critique that you and Kent offered a hypothetical formula, that about 1/3 of the word count goes MIA after editing a first draft. This has been pretty true, though, being familiar with what my first drafts tend to look like, you can probably guess that it is often a lot more than that.
I did once write a novel that I ended up editing down to a short story. There are things I started as short stories that ballooned into novellas/novels. But if I can hit 2k on a project on a writing day with a project, usually I can at least be certain that I’ll complete the story I’m attempting to tell, whatever form it takes after edits.