If you’ve ever listened to me blather on about writing, or read one of these blog posts on the subject, you know one thing: I am not a big believer in the value of word count as a metric of writing progress. It’s useful after you’ve finished a manuscript, to see what, exactly, you’ve created in marketing terms. But as a daily goal, I think it encourages busywork writing, and as an overall goal I think it encourages padding.
Your mileage may vary, of course; for some writers having a definitive word count goal for the day is the only way they can work, or it might simply be baked into their process. And that’s fine; I’m certainly not the God of How to Write Yer Stories, I’m just a gob with opinions. The main thing for me is, don’t let word count become the point.
No One Buys a Book for the Word Count
That’s the thing with daily word counts and even project word counts—achieving them can feel like progress even if your story stinks. This happens to me, too; I’m not immune to the siren call of word count stats. Often I imbue a story with a certain importance solely because I’ve reached a more or less random plateau and have decided, for no real reason, the the story is now Too Big to Fail. Sometimes this is 3,000 words, sometimes 30,000, but there’s always a point where it crosses over into TBtF territory and I begin investing a truly incredible amount of mental and emotional energy into trying to make it at least resemble a real book or short story.
But I should remind myself—as should you—that people don’t care much about word counts when they read a story. Instead of worrying over sunk costs when I have a certain number of words piled up, I should be worried about whether or not the story itself is good, and whether anyone is going to want to read it. A short story that is compelling and surprising is miles better than a doorstopper novel that is dull and lifeless.
Easier said than done, of course, which is why, in part, word counts is a more seductive metric: You can always achieve a word count goal. Artistic goals can be much more slippery, and thus more frustrating.
For my part, I’m going to start a campaign to get novel length redefined to, say, 5,000 words, for resume-padding reasons. Who’s with me?