For whatever reason I get asked all the time how long a story should be. There's really only one answer to this and it is 'a story should be exactly as long as it needs to be'. I don't even know how many times I've told people that.
So of course, in light of yesterday's entry about things coming back to haunt me, I've become obsessed with word counts. When I'm sitting here writing and I check my word count every hour. It goes up, it goes down, a lot of the time I check it and can't remember what it was the last time I checked it.
It's stupid because if you ask me what number I'm aiming for, I'd tell you I don't know.
(Of course, I'd be lying. A while back out of boredom or curiosity or procrastination I spent some time looking up how many words a first novel should be. This was back when I had ~5k words and I thought I was going to write a novel in three weeks. I figured there wasn't enough story to get me to 10k words. I was very, very wrong. Anyway I found out that a first novel is usually around 50k words and it's been stuck in my head ever since. Not that I'm aiming for that. Really.)
The one good thing about watching my word count climb is that it's a somewhat objective measure of how much work I've done in a given day. I find that sometimes I'll write a really good scene and think that I can call it a day. Then I spend the rest of the day not writing. At one scene a day, I'll be dead of old age before this book is finished.
It also lets me know that I am getting something done. Right now this thing is just a collection of scenes. I tried to write out the most important scenes first so I could see what the characters were going to do and how they were going to interact. Then I could go back and transition from scene to scene.
At first I was just writing both the scenes and transitions together. Unfortunately, the closer I got to my characters and the more time I spent in front of the keyboard, the more they started to act like real people. They did the same things every day, hung out with the same people and had the same conversations. It was just like real life and just like much of real life, it made for an awful story. So I wrote out all the key scenes to give the story some sort of direction so I wouldn't get lost in the details.
The problem is that when I spend all day writing a transition between two scenes that take place at the beginning of the story it can start to feel like I'm not making any progress at all because I'm now fucking with the same material that I fucked with two weeks ago. At least when I feel like I'm not making any progress I can look at the word count and realize that I did get some work done.
This is all a very long way of tell you that I'm going to start posting my word counts here as a way to track my progress.
So remember any story should be exactly as long it takes to tell it.
Today I hit ~19k words.
Posted by Ben Corman at 8:47 PM