The Word Count

I’ve found another thing to write a blog post about! The dreaded WORD COUNT.

Recently I’ve had some encounters with word count woes that make me want to talk about it. Firstly was this post on tumblr, taken from Nic Alderton but shared and probably called the most attention to by Neil Gaiman:

This is a very nice, simple, stripped-to-the-basics concept. But there’s something very wrong about this very simple, stripped-to-the-basics concept. It includes a limitation. It tells you that the basics of writing a story are that – come up with one, and write it. How simple is that? BUT IN 80,000 WORDS! Oh. Not so simple. A very random, irrelevant, and specific addition to this otherwise very non specific, “freeing” concept about how uncomplicated it should be!

So why 80,000 words? Why would you include that? I follow several blogs of editors who often deal with frantic, worried questions from their followers concerning word count, and it’s very difficult to tell exactly how picky the publishing world actually is about word count via their answers. It’s difficult to even tell how a specific publishing house might define the actual length of a novel! Somewhere between 75k and 120k, which is a HUGE margin! You can practically fit an entire second novel in that margin! In fact, what I’ve read about acceptable word count in a professional setting seems to be so unspecific about it as to be very flexible. Obviously I’m not expert on this, but I’ve come to a conclusion that worrying about word count while writing is extremely damaging.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about writing (it’s her novel that I’m editing), and we’ve never had a conversation about her writing that doesn’t include her obsessing over word count. How many words she’s written so far, how many words she wants it to be, how afraid she is it’ll end up going over her projected count, how many words X part should be compared to Y part, books similar to hers and their word count, etc. etc. just on and on about to the point where I just told her outright yesterday that she should quit worrying about word count and the more important thing is to write the damn novel.

The hardest thing about writing is getting it out. That’s why I approve so much of NaNo, while a lot of writers and editors and critics are all over the map with what they think of it. It’s not specifically urging to you write 50,000 words of crap in a month (which is how some people have come to take it), but just 50,000 WORDS. The words are the most important part; you can’t have your story without words, any words at all. And for some people, maybe even most people, getting those words squeezed out of your brain and down to your fingers and out through a pen or a keyboard is the single most difficult part of ever completing a writing project. Because it really is fucking hard sometimes.

So worrying and fretting about word count is the most damaging thing I think someone can do. Just write your story. Tell it. Use 150,000 words, use 150. Use exactly how many you think you need, or how many it takes. Because whatever comes out, it’s a draft. You can change it. You can cut it, you can add it. If your book gets picked up, you probably will be told to cut or add. But you have to MAKE the story first, and you need those words to come out and form it before you can do anything. It doesn’t matter how many words. So don’t go about writing a story worrying and fretting about word count, about keeping it at 80,000 words or below 120,000 or above 75,000. Just forget about numbers. You’re dealing with words.

Editing a story might be a whole other deal, especially if you're aware of a word count maximum or minimum on publishers you plan to submit to, but editing is a different animal with a different set of rules and behavior. Word count shouldn't be such a huge focus when you're just writing the story.

I posted this on tumblr as well, but I feel it’s worth reiterating. One of my very few amazing college professors had a very relevant idea about word count and length, even if he was talking about essays. Whenever the first essay in his class would be assigned (and I had three classes with him so I saw this happen several times), someone would of course ask how long it would need to be. When this happened, the professor would climb up onto the nearest table or desk (and he was an elderly, well-dressed gentleman), point at his pants, and inform everyone that our essays would need to be “as long as his trousers”. Inevitably some student would say “so about four pages/three feet, then?” and the professor would reply, “it should be as long as it needs to be to properly cover the subject.”

Which is exactly how any story should be as well. Fretting about word count is just as distracting as pissing around on the internet is in the long run.