Say a novel is 90,000 words and you have three writing evenings a fortnight. Two of those fortnights you’re on holiday, so call it 24 fortnights a year. That gives you 72 writing evenings a year. So to write the novel in a year, you need to write 1250 words every writing evening. Cool. Sounds doable. Let’s g–
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE. Word count is like paint.
This September, Will and I set about repainting the living room. We knew the size of the walls, and they all needed to be covered in paint, so measuring our progress in inches of paint would be reasonable, right? Our 30 square meters worked out as 46,500 inches of paint. We wanted to finish it in two days, so call each day eight hours, so we’d each need to paint 1,453 inches an hour. Cool. Sounds doable. Let’s go.
Will, wielding the roller, had a great painting day! He did loads! Me, going around with the cutting-in brush – I didn’t do nearly so well. Very few inches indeed. I guess I’m just a slower painter.
That was the afternoon, though. Actually, we both had a terrible painting morning. We were vacuuming walls, sugar soaping, dusting behind radiators, moving furniture, laying paint sheets – classic PAB (Painting Avoiding Behaviour) amiright? Not an inch of paint applied. Disaster.
Yeah, yeah, without that, we’d get paint clagging up with invisible spider webs and dust bunnies, paint peeling where there were grease marks, paint spattered on the sofa and floor, yadda yadda yadda… Pfft. Just excuses. Just putting off getting started. Painting nerves, right?
The next day, sadly, when we moved onto painting the skirting boards, dado rail, and cornices, Will’s painting streak evaporated. He actually did even fewer inches than me. While I got on with the business of getting paint on surfaces, you know, actually painting, he procrastinated, faffing about with “caulking” then “letting it dry”, he was “rehanging curtains”, “rehanging paintings”, “taking up paint sheets”, “carrying furniture”, “cleaning the roller”… He probably had some kind of Painter’s Block, right?
Obviously, this is absurd. The prep is essential. Clean-up is essential. Painting with a roller (province of Will’s long reach) is wildly different to cutting in edges and trimmings (province of my steady hand). Will’s expertise with caulking is a lot better than hurriedly bodging paint into the gaps, and of course it needs to dry before it’s painted. Of course the room needs to be put back together. While we want every inch painted, we can’t measure progress by inches painted. That would be unhinged.
It’s exactly the same with writing and word count. We know roughly how many words we ultimately want, for a short story or a novel, but we can’t measure our progress in word count. Any more than we can measure our painting in inches.
Here are just some of the important writing activities that don’t add word count, add it very slowly, or actually subtract it:
- Researching things that’ll change the plot shape (eg a particular law for a court case)
- Researching details that’ll make it convincing (eg when a crescent moon is visible)
- Deep-dive brainstorming stuff you need to make up (eg the food / market for your world)
- Deep-dive planning crucial info (eg currency for a story where money matters)
- Reworking a first-draft scene to be less clichéd / adverby in its second draft
- Reworking a second-draft scene in response to feedback on characterisation, logistical details, etc
- Cutting a scene’s tangents to make it pacier
- Turning chunks of exposition into detail drip-fed through existing scenes
- Editing generic words (eg “tree”) into specific words (eg “mangrove”)
- Creating a plot map or tension map (at the start, in the middle, or to rework the story)
- Refining the opening / ending lines of scenes and chapters to enhance narrative tension
- Revising a character’s dialogue to make it more their voice
- Rereading the whole story to assess it for redrafting
- Creating an overview by chapter
- Identifying plot holes and issues
- Resolving plot holes and issues
- Moving scenes and tweaking them for their new position
- Making a spreadsheet of the timing / calendar across the story
- Cutting paragraphs, scenes, even chapters
- Fine-grain editing of the near-final draft
Unlike painting, there isn’t One Right Order to do these. You don’t have to plan before you start putting down words. A lot of those things happen alongside, between, or after the activities that do increase word count – but note that I don’t say alongside, between, or after the writing. They’re all part of the writing. Just like everything Will and I were doing was part of the painting.
A lot of gung-ho writing advice says “Just get the words down!” I also say, “Write it badly, you can fix it later.” But fixing it later is part of the writing, whether that’s at the end of the scene, the chapter, the story, however you prefer to work. So is planning, if you need to know where the story’s going before you start getting words down. So is reworking, so is research, so is editing, so is all of it.
They’re not “writing nerves”, WAB (Writing Avoiding Behaviour), procrastination, or Writer’s Block: they are writing. And rather than being a sign that you’re “scared of doing the writing”, they make you a lot braver about writing. How much easier is it to rough out first draft when you know you’ll sort out the details later? And how much easier is it to sort out the details when you’re not beating yourself up for “not writing”?
You can have a brilliant, incredibly successful, deeply valuable writing session that doesn’t increase the word count at all. You are not Lorem Ipsum: your purpose is not word count. You are a person: your purpose is a wonderful story.
If you want to read more about breaking free of the wordcount-goal trap, read this tip: Set time not goals and this article: The Joy Is In the Doing.
