These days we are prisoners to the idea that achievement in writing equates to number of words written. I often see tweets from writers bemoaning lack of progress, because they missed the target.
Well, I don’t subscribe to this idea at all. Word count is an essential writing tool. Publishers and editors use it to define scale of commissioned work. Writers have to learn to meet those counts. It’s part of the skill set.
But it is not an end in itself. What counts more is whether what’s been written meets the purpose intended by the author. Which, ultimately, is to evoke an emotion in the recipient. So instead of feeling guilty at not having written x-number of words, try looking back over what you’ve achieved in terms of those deeper goals and aims of writing. The key questions are:
1. Has it advanced your intent in the writing?
2. Is the style to your liking? Are they the right words?
In short, what counts is the quality of end product – focus on purpose. Being able to produce that to a specified word length is one marker of that quality. But only one.
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013
I fully agree. I have always valued quality over quantity. I have never believed in dashing off a first draft with my inner editor switched off. You might have a great wordcount for the day, but how much time will be lost editing later. My max wordcount for the day has never been over 3000 and tends to average around 2000 per day. Not high, but I don’t use wordcount to measure whether a day has been successful.
Precisely. If a writer blurts out 5000 words in a day – but then spends the next 4 days editing them, their actual word count is 1000 words a day…and, for all that writing is creative, those trying to make a living from it also have to consider it a business, with due cost-to-time calculations.
I couldn’t agree more. I find it highly irritating when I come blogs where people quote their daily word count numbers or targets as if it’s something to be proud of. Quality is what matters and it is where they should concentrate their efforts on. Also, some writers quote massive tomes of near 200,000 words, again, as if it’s something to be proud of. I for one would be ashamed of writing such a large piece of work (if it was fiction) as it would be a clear indicator that I was probably writing large amounts of poor quality text that contained excessive exposition and so on.
A lot of ‘epic’ fiction does just that. In fact I can think of one or two ‘epic scale’ works by well known authors that do that – trading, perhaps, off their earlier repute rather than the intrinsic quality of the work in hand. Absolutely agree – there is no kudos to writing something that dribbles, when the same can be said succinctly. My favourite? Hemingway’s Old Man And The Sea. A novella, really. Very short. And yet perhaps the best piece of literary fiction written in the mid-twentieth century. Not many words…but they were the right words. Good stuff.
My biggest frustration is marketing. My book has been very well reviewed. Sadly, my publisher is small and can’t do much marketing. I do my best, but marketing is not my area of expertise. I really don’t know how to get the word out. I think my poetry, my book is stirring, but who knows about it? I often equate success to “who knows about it.” Frustrating!!!!
S. Thomas Summers
Author of Private Hercules McGraw: Poems of the American Civil War
Yes it is. Your writing is simply fantastic – and it’s a shame that you can’t get better coverage. That highlights the essential problem today: discovery. I don’t know the answer myself, and I can only see it getting worse. Promotions through trad media cost rather more than the GDP of some small African nations, and the web is not a low-cost answer because the same ‘social networking’ and ‘web 2′ developments that have generated the ‘democratisation’ of publishing have also ‘democratised’ the promotional tools. A homogenisation which means the individual voice is unheard amidst what amounts to ‘white noise’. The things that do get famous are, in a mathematical sense, essentially random – and also dismayingly short-lived.To me is is classically symptomatic of standard crowd behaviour, facilitated in this case on a colossal scale through the internet. ‘Gagnam writing’, anyone? I despair sometimes.
But I also believe that quality DOES have its day – and that people who write quality material (as you do) have a far better shot at earning and building sustained success and repute. The elusive part is knowing quite how to be heard above the noise – and I’m not sure that anybody has particular answers to that.
Matt, your ears must have been burning when you wrote this post. I could not agree with you more. My recent experience with a word count writing challenge have certainly proved this out.
Thank you! Actually, thinking about it, I am fairly sure that ‘race to word count’ wasn’t an issue when I was learning the craft, back in the days of typewriters and pen-and-ink revisions. I do wonder whether the advent of the word processor hasn’t helped fuel an age of ‘quantity’ writing. It is way too easy to type out lots of words these days – and have the computer count them for you – but the challenges of making them good words are no different from what they have always been.
I agree. Word count in itself is meaningless. It’s not how many words that matter, but that I’ve written the right words.
Absolutely. I have to confess, one of my techniques is to blurt out a lot of words and then go through them – the right ones are usually discovered within the morass somewhere. Or maybe hiding a little to the side, emerging when I realise the stuff I’ve actually written is rubbish and needs a complete re-cast. Iterations, rather than composition on-the-stone, sometimes has advantages. Of course, what that means is that ‘word-count’ at this initial stage has much the same import as ‘assembling the building materials’.
It’s different for everyone, of course.