Is it only me or do other writers look at their word counts obsessively? I've started doing it as a way of motivating myself but am not sure whether it's the right thing to do. I want to reach 100,000 but am viewing it as some kind of challenge to get there. Probably similar to the nano writing thing where you just write write write. Of course I'm aware that it's quality not quantity that's important, but first drafts are often a case of putting stuff down and pushing ahead. Any views on this?

first drafts are often a case of putting stuff down and pushing ahead.

That's very true for almost (not quite)everyone, and having a target can make one get on with it and keep going.

I'm wary of writing to total word limits, thought. I know there is a broad min-max word limit for a novel, but I would say, never mind the people/websites/books that tell you 'literary' can be shorter than 'commercial' or 'historical' can be longer than 'chick lit'. A novel should be the length it should be, and thinking about such external (and often not true) criteria just confuses your proper, writerly instincts about pace and structure.

On the other hand we all need to feel we're getting somewhere along the way, and I think daily/weekly wordcounts can really help. You may not have finished a chapter, but you did 100 words after you got back from the pub. Pat yourself on the back. Or if you're a natural skiver like me (why else do you think I'm typing this instead of doing the laundry?) then give yourself permission to skive, once you've done your 1000 words for this morning.

At the very least, wordcounts help you not to give up in despair at the scale of the task you've set yourself. A friend taught me to knit, and got me to choose a pattern with stripes for my first project. The point was that for a painfully slow beginner-knitter, it was much easier to keep going by saying 'I'll just finish this stripe' than it was to say 'only another sixty centimetres to go'. And I could count the stripes, and see there were two more than last week, even if the armhole was still months away.

Emma

My problem is obsessively attempting to reduce my word-count. My first non-handwritten version of No Mystics clocked in at around 220,000. It left no shit uncovered, so to speak. The current draft is, as of today, 165,000, but may well be somewhat shorter by tomorrow, or next week, as I'm aware that regardless of whatever may be considered the 'norm' for general fiction, it's harder to get a longer first novel published. I've got 'killing my darlings' down to a fine art! When I did my English & Creative Writing degree and had to write poetry, my epic tendencies showed up there, as well. Not only did I write long, narrative poems, I wrote them as a sequence, like a linear novel, so none made much sense without the others. And this from the woman who can still remember long, long, dull days in school English classes, when studying 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner' seemed to take up an entire year, if not more...

Julie

Yes, the road to publication is littered with the corpses of darlings. You've probably tried this, but time away from it can help you see the wood for the trees more clearly, plus the holiday-packing approach: don't ask, 'should this bit be in here?' but, 'does it absolutely have to be in here, or could I possibly do without it?' That said, I don't think anyone in the trade notices length until it's over at least 150,000, or under about 65,000, so there's quite a lot of leeway. In the end, it's the length it needs to be.

I have epic tendencies too. Fairly manageable in long fiction (TMOL is 147,000 words) but it's taken me a long time to learn to write short fiction that doesn't read like a quart bursting out of pint pot.

Emma

That's interesting - I've found I haven't been able to sustain anything more than 85K. I want to write an epic but feel that my concentration span is too short - does anyone else have the same thing with writing chapters? Most of mine are short because I get bored or am unable to sustain the idea.

If things come out that length, then they're probably meant to be like that. If you get bored with a scene it may be a guide that a reader would too. Or it may be because for one reason or another you're writing more slowly than suits you, so that this scene seems to be taking forever, which it is, in one sense, but not necessarily for the reader; in revision you may find it whizzes past.

I'm slowly learning to recognise the natural length of any idea, and it's counter-productive to try to pad it out, or squash it down. That suggests that your epic will have to wait for you to have an epic-scaled idea which naturally wants to be longer. Or is it that you're associating epic lengths with 'proper' or 'serious' writing, or conversely, 'commercial' writing (as opposed to the slim literary volume)? That's not a good reason for trying to make a piece longer.

On the other hand, it may be that you need to go back later and add just as Julie's gone back later and cut. I think I said something in a thread a few months back about writers being either cutters or adders. It's not as simple as that, of course, but I know that it's often not until I'm revising that I realise I must to go back and flesh things out, because though I originally wrote what was enough for me to evoke what someone's feeling, or what a room looked like, it isn't enough to get a reader really immersed in the scene and wanting to stay there.

Emma

Yeah you're right EmmaD - until I have the right idea, it won't happen - I think I just feel insecure when I look at bigger books! It's a really stupid thing to feel. I guess it's a personal challenge for me too. And also I'm worried that I'm rushing scenes and not going into enough detail. But I take your point about if a scene is boring for me then it will be boring for the reader, that's why I have changed my writing technique, I am committed to writing exciting, energetic prose so I will not write when I am 'bored'. Not sure that makes sense, but before I used to try to force my writing - write throughout boredom - whereas now I try to tap into the energy points and try to use them most effectively so my writing is always moving forward.

In a bookshop it's awfully easy to feel that you're one-down in the playground game of 'mine's bigger than yours'. And there is something grand about a 'big' book, but only if that's muscle and sinew, not fat.

I think being awake to your own process as you obviously are, Traveller, is terribly helpful, (though it can become a sort of writerly hypochondria) and keeping moving forward is absolutely crucial. I'm horribly bored with chapter 4, and I've only just realised that's at least partly because I've been trying to write it in fits and starts among domestic complications, and I'm only seeing - and disliking - the superficial aspects, never getting absorbed in the characters and images. Plus forgetting that it's a first draft, and I can change every single word later if I want to, so there!

Emma

Word counts are useful as a guide so I don't fall miles short of my goal. Obsessive counting stops the creative flow for me anyway. I write the bare bones then pad it out, then cut and cut again. On the subject of wordcounts does anyone know how accurate they are, can we trust them 100%?
Kat