A Word About Word Counts

I've heard it said you shouldn't count the words. Write what you want to. Let the story do the driving. Don't be distracted by the numbers. In a perfect Utopian literary world - and we all know there's no such thing - that might work for some. I always count the words. I think the key is to be aware of the word count but not to worry about it.

Sometimes that's not as easy as it sounds. While writing my first YA novel, I was aware the words were piling up much too quickly. Painfully aware because I was writing outside my comfort zone. But I kept going. I knew if I put the complete story on the page, I could edit out what didn't need to be there and still retain the structure. If I tried to adjust the pacing would be all wrong and this is a book where the chronology of change is important. I know my writing bad habits will make it easy to reduce the number of words. I write a lot of fluff and over fill that screams to be deleted the first time I redit.

Words counts are critical to me on a maintenance basis. They establish my writing habit. I write 500 words a day. Every day. I'm not a fast writer so sometimes even that's hard. When I'm talking about output I'm happy to include anything creative I write. Even this blog post. It's not about getting the story completed, its about muscle memory for good writing habits.

AR BookFinder: Samurai Kids #2: Owl Ninja

For the first draft I like to know where I'm going word count wise even though I don't let it dictate to me. I know when I begin to redraft I will inevitably cut and add large chunks so at this stage all I need to do is head in the right direction.

How do I know what a reasonable word count is? I ask the  books I love and respect, the ones I wish I had written and occasionally, one that I did! I look up the word counts of any of these books with similar genre and target readership on the AR Bookfinder site.To find the word count search by author or title and when the book is displayed, click on the tile for more details including the word count.

Samurai Kids #8: Black tengu

My book is magical realism so I've got some leeway. Fantasy novels are often twice the word count of realistic novels and at 90,000 (after 5 edits) I'm currently sitting in between. I can go either way and no doubt I will in both directions before I am happy.

I have strategies I use when I edit. Some of these raise the word count (like upping the conflict and mending plot holes) and some whittle it away (like removing adverbs,redundancy and extraneous, tightening description and deleting unnecessary dialogue). But I never focus on any particular one for the sake of word count.

Somehow in the end it ultimately all comes together. Except once. The last Samurai Kids book, Black Tengu, was too short. I suspect I was in too much of a hurry to tell Sensei's story and I left a big chunk of it inside my head. But that meant when I had to expand, the words all there ready and waiting. Fasted 4,000 words I ever wrote!

When the Blogosphere Speaks, I Listen

I love it when the blogosphere speaks to me personally. Over on my good friend Di Bate's blog Writing for Children, author Sherryl Clark is writing a post for me. Not that Sherryl knows that!

The post is called When Writers Resign. It talks about the ups and downs of this writing life and why most writers keep writing  through them all because ultimately we need to create. It also talks about how, like with any other job, we really can can resign if we want to.

I have been heading further and further out into the writing wilderness for the last three years. I didn't choose for life to go that way. My youngest son became very sick with symptoms that no-one could fully explain. Everything fell in the 'diagnosis by exclusion' bucket and there's no effective for those. Some things helped but the things that constrained his life were always there. And so was I. All day and often multiple times through the night. My days were a round of specialists, medication, painkillers, home schooling and hot water bottles. Half way through I got sick too. It was hard to write with a life like that.

I'm much better now and in recent weeks my son has seen the first improvement ever. I am gradually inching my way back from the wilderness. I always had a lifeline. The Samurai Kids series had its own momentum, there were always books to be written and in the worst of times I still managed two. The last one, Black Tengu, was released on September 1 and I'm proud to say its the best of them all.

But at the same time I decided to make it even harder to walk out of the wilderness. I shot myself in the foot. I started a new manuscript. One outside my comfort zone. One that was hard to write.  But it was a story I loved and a story I believed in. I kept going. For a few weeks recently I wondered if I was in the middle of what Sherryl refers to as the story that just won't work and has to be abandoned years later.

Image from http://laughingsquid.com/

But again the blogosphere spoke to me. Over at LaughingSquid.com is a post "Hand in Hand, Writers Share Advice in Notes on Their Own Hands. It's an April 2013 post but it's been waiting there for me. First up is Neil Gaiman, an author whose writing I not only admire but whose writing about writing always strikes me with its truth. There were three points on Neil's hand. Number 2 was for me. Finish things.

I should have known this. I'd already been told. I'd even filed the wisdom away. Neil Gaiman's 8 Rules for Writing.

There's a lot of editing and rewriting involved with my current manuscript, but I'm getting closer to the finish. And I feel good.