The Myth of Word Counts
Ask any writer how they’re day is going, and one of the first answers you’ll hear is a number. Not their place on a bestseller list, or the lucky number from their star charts. I’m talking Word Count, the number by which many authors—myself included—judge themselves every day.
My kids will tell you, a day on which I’ve written lots of words is a day when I’m happy. A low-to-zero word count day? I’m prone to grumpiness, and fits of angry dish washing. No one wants to be around mommy on a day without words written. At least, that was the case until my recent attempt at a change of heart.
Like many authors, I’ve swung wildly over the course of my career in terms of how many words I feel I should write per day. At first, I had no way to know how much or how little other people were writing. I knew nothing about the business and had no writer friends. (I was a simpler time.) If I was on a roll, I could write 3 or 4 thousand for a day or two, but then I needed to take a couple days off to recharge my imagination before diving in again.
Sometime around when I started wanting to think of myself as a professional writer, I decided that I HAD to be consistent. Professional writers, I reasoned, plotted and made outlines. They wrote EVERY DAY. Taking this to heart, I laid out elaborate plot outlines, and forced myself to write a thousand words a day, with a plan to amp that up over time.
Well…that worked. I guess. The truth was, most days I ended up writing more than a thousand words, and I only followed my outlines when I was feeling completely devoid of the creative spirit. The biggest problem with this method was I ended up having to cut TONS. Like, tons and tons of words that were in there only because I was meeting my word count. I was a rewriter, I reasoned, and continued to press ahead.
Then at some point, I decided I wanted to make money at the writing gig, and decided I needed to write LOTS. I read a string of articles by successful authors shouting about how they wrote five thousand—nay ten thousand—words a day!
THIS was the answer, I reasoned. 5K days. I could do it. I knew I could write a thousand words an hour without breaking a sweat, and with the tiniest application of elbow grease, I could slam out the kind of word counts that the Big Girls wrote!
That was last year. And yeah, I did write a lot of books. A full length novel, and ten novellas. But I also wrote TONS AND TONS of false starts, misguided scenes, and just plain crap I had to cut. Writers always quote Nora Roberts and say that “you can’t edit a blank page.” Well, I gave myself pages to edit alright. Pages and pages of total garbage that may or may not have had anything to do with the rest of my story.
Let’s take a look at what 5K-a-day really meant for me, shall we?
I could write 5K in a day, sure. I could even do it two days running. On the third day, though, it fell apart. I’d spit out 2K (usually of worthless nonsense) and then freak out and read through my story from the beginning. Then I’d rewrite the 12K I’d done within an inch of it’s life before repeating the process of two days of high word count, followed by yet another attack of terror and fit of rewriting.
The side effects of my experiment were evident. More books released, yes, but also an increasing rate of false starts and just plain sucky words as the year went on until in both July and September I wrote absolutely nothing I could ever publish.
I’m extremely proud of much of the work I did last year, especially the stuff I wrote at the very end of the year. Those last three books, though, were written AFTER I’d abandoned my 5K-a-day efforts, choosing instead to write 3-4K a day for a few days at a time.
This February marks my third year of writing. One could argue I have more time to write now, and one could argue the opposite. But the fact remains—a “good” writing day for me is 3-4,000 words. And I can NEVER do it for more than 4 days in a row. Honestly, I’m best if I do it for 3 days at a time. No more.
Generally speaking, my writing process is very similar to what it was in the beginning. I can write 8-10K fluently, then I need to go back through it, editing and reworking, before sprinting ahead over the course of another few days.
I don’t write every day. On the weekends, I reread, edit, do paperwork, or even spend my days driving my kids around.
Now, when I plot and outline, I know it’s just to get my creative juices flowing. With three years of experience, I know I’m not going to follow my outlines. More importantly, I know it’s a terrible idea to try and follow my outlines. My absolute worst writing fuck-ups happen when I blindly followed my best laid plans.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. For me, the story tells the story. Outlines, pictures, graphics and the rest are just disembodied ideas. The ONLY way I can know what comes next is to take a break, read what I wrote, think, rest, rewrite, and then write it forward.
I wrote my first three books in four and a half months. You know that sad little process I had when no one was looking? It worked. I’m glad I fucked with it, because I’ve learned more about writing, and myself, but the truth is, I could optimize my internal schedule, but never change it. To do so ruins the spark that got me writing in the first place.
The best advice I can give to new writers is a paraphrasing of something Suleikha Sneider said earlier today on twitter—only YOU can know which process words best for you. Plotter or pantster, sprinting or plodder, non-stop writer or frequent chillax-er, what matters is that you turn out work you can be happy with, on a schedule that keeps you sane and productive.
The rest is just words.
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