Fuck Wordcounts

[rynling]

One of the reasons I don’t like wordcounts as a measure of writing activity is because, to me at least, so much of writing is editing, and so much of editing is deleting things, like:

- The reader doesn’t need to know this
- The reader can figure this out for themselves
- This description is unnecessary
- This subordinate clause is unnecessary
- This prepositional phrase is unnecessary
- This past perfect participle is unnecessary
- This dialogue tag is unnecessary
- This sentence needs to be shorter
- You repeated this word like three times
- You like this word but it breaks the flow of the sentence
- This observation is not as amusing to the reader as it is to you

I have to admit that I don’t much care for writing advice along the lines of “show don’t tell” and “don’t force the character’s perspective on the reader,” none of which tends to work with the sort of limited third-person narration I favor, in which the reader only has access to what the character would notice or remark on. In fact, I tend to find action-focused third-person omniscient narration tedious.

Still, so much of editing is deleting and rewriting, which is why I can spend an intense and focused half hour on a piece of writing and go from 1570 words to 1530 words. Work is being done, but “wordcount” just isn’t a meaningful measure of progress.

Idk, I always get a little defensive during Nanowrimo. Every month is novel writing month in my house.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Idk, I always get a little defensive during Nanowrimo. Every month is novel writing month in my house.

YES. SAME.

Even when I was doing NaNo, more so in recent years, there was this mentality within the community to just get words out. Words, words, words. Do whatever you can to get words. Here are these ten tricks for more words. The bigger the number, the better. And lately - for me, at least - I'd rather focus on writing a cohesive story than how many words it's going to be. With NaNo, I kind of just wrote for the sake of getting more words instead of actually making progress.

And editing is just as important as writing the damn draft. It pains me to see so much hate around editing when I've come to love it. Granted, it took me a long time to make editing work for me, but the same can be said for writing.

And yet I still keep track of my word counts, though it's less to do with GOTTA MAKE THAT NUMBER GO UP WOOOOOOOO and more to do with reverse engineering to pace myself for bigger projects or deadlines (if this fic has X scenes and each scene is roughly Y words, then it's somewhere around Z total words. And I write A words per hour, which means to get the first draft done without losing my sanity, I need to write B hours for C days this is what happens when you've led One Too Many project development things at work)

[lassarina]

It's interesting because how I view writing is that the NaNo process (write it, doesn't matter if it's bad) is very useful for getting the story out of my head in some terrible format - heck, sometimes I've dumped three variations of the same scene into my NaNoWriMo document because I didn't like the way it was coming out - but once I have a draft, I'm more interested in hours written/days on which I did writing, than wordcount. It seems to be a switch that flips in my mind for what I need to do. (By the same token, measuring "days on which I've written" doesn't seem to push me to generate much in the way of new content. writing is hard!)