Forget About Daily Word Counts – Just Write the Story Already
I’m going take a slightly controversial view of daily word counts. (Let the internet flame war begin.) If you’ve been writing for any amount of time you’ve no doubt encountered several books and blogs that urge authors to set a daily word count and stick to it no matter what. Stephen King suggests that the serious writer should produce at least one thousand words a day. NaNoWriMo contestants need to crank out two-thousand words every day to be considered winners. And some widely respected internet gurus insist that, in this day and age of digital self-publishing, you need to write 4,000 words a day in order to keep up with consumer demand! I’ve even been guilty of insisting that new and struggling authors meet a daily word count if they want to succeed.
Daily word counts have become an obsession with a cult-like following.
But arbitrary word counts fail to take into account what you are trying to accomplish. What are you really trying to accomplish when you sit down to write? Is your goal to write 60,000 words? Or is your goal to tell a great story?
I contend this blind allegiance to daily word counts that grip the writing community is sabotaging authors and resulting in poor books full of filler and bereft of plot. I think a lot of new and inexperienced authors are getting lost and discouraged in their quest to churn out a certain number of words. I’m reading more and more books lately that have a lot of words but don’t amount to much, and I can’t shake the feeling that the author was cramming thoughts and descriptions into the novel in order to meet some arbitrary word count.
I recently finished a book ( title withheld ) that treated me to a 442 word description of craft beer. I know because I counted them. Mind you, this was a detective novel and the beer had nothing to do with solving the case. The action of the novel stopped every few pages while the author went down rabbit holes full of description but had no bearing on the story outcome.
If you sit down every day to write a certain number of words, you’ll probably meet your goal. The human psyche is an incredibly powerful thing. If you want something bad enough, your brain will usually figure out a way to make it happen. But if your only purpose is to type 2k words, will those words be worth reading? Did you create a scene at the end of the day? Or just a bunch of words filling up pages? Did your story move forward? Or are your characters navel gazing? Is your dialogue crisp? Does it propel the story? Or does it ramble? Do your scenes add to the narrative arc? Or do they simply exist in order to fill pages?
At the end of the day, every word should propel the story forward. A bunch of words which fail to move the plot along is just that, a bunch of words. Words nobody wants to read.
We’ve all seen movies crammed with a lot of extra footage. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is a perfect example. Now, before you break out the torches and pitchforks, I loved the books long before the movies were even dreamt of, and enjoyed the films but let’s be honest; they were too darn long. Long stretches of screen time are dedicated to helicopter shots of New Zealand. It’s pretty country and all, but you could edit most of those wilderness shots from the final product and still have the same exact movie, minus about forty minutes of footage. LOTR is a story which hinges on travel but I don’t need to see every single step from the Shire to Mount Doom.
Books with extraneous words are like movie epics that pad the screen time with beautiful vistas of rugged landscapes which don’t move the plot forward. Kind of nice to look at, but it gets old fast.
For most authors, the problem is found in the outline, or lack thereof.
If you sit down to write, and you don’t know what happens next, chances are good you’ll fill your story with characters doing random pedestrian things like washing dishes, brushing their teeth, and pontificating on the qualities of craft beer. You fall into this trap because you have to produce 1k words a day, but you aren’t sure where the story is going, so you just start writing. When that happens, the author’s subconscious will intrude on the story to fill empty pages until the author figures out what the character should be doing.
The result is either a 400 page novel that could be cut down to 60 pages (but that’s hardly novel length so you leave all the extraneous crap in to pad the page count). Or, best case scenario, an 800 page book that can be cut down, with a lot of hard work and serious editing, to a respectable 350 pages. The first book is DOA and the second book is going to need some serious surgery if you want it to sell and get good reviews.
Most of your problem can be fixed if you start with a plot outline. Check out my book Crafting Fiction for my best advice on outlining a story before you start writing.
If you know where the story is going, then you won’t waste time wadding around in the proverbial swamp every day when you sit down to write. You’ll be able to jump right into the action and get the plot moving.
Now all you need to do is write the darn thing. Another huge benefit to having a plot outline is that you can focus on writing scenes instead of words.
And this is the thrust of this whole blog post.
I have come to the place in my own writing, where I no longer worry much about how many daily words I’m producing. Instead I focus on writing scenes. One scene a day is my bare minimum and two scenes is my stretch goal. Because it takes me about a thousand words (give or take) to write a scene, I produce 2k words on a good day and around a thousand on a day when I’m having trouble making the magic happen. But 1k a day is still respectable and gets the job done.
If you write short scenes like James Patterson, aim to finish four scenes a day. At an average of 500 words per scene, you’ll hit 2k words a day, or very close to it. If you write long, detailed scenes like the late Tom Clancy, try to finish one a day.
The beauty to this method is that you’ll be focused on telling the story instead of just producing words. Your job as an author is to tell me a story that I want to read. Keep me engaged with an entertaining tale, well-told. Don’t bore me with words.
Did this help you out? Do you agree, or think I’m crazy? Let me know (in as few words as possible) what you thought.
