Word count

I was chatting to a mate at work the other day and he asked me how I did it; how I wrote a book, let alone two. This I found slightly strange, as the man has a journalistic background, but it got me thinking. How actually do I do it? What is it that makes me able to put thousands of little words down on the page, with most of them in the right order? So this morning I gave it some thought and I came up with the following.

“I don’t have to write much, but I do have to write something. That seems to be the thing that keeps me going. Everyday, in some way, I must write something - Be it on a computer, an iPad, on my phone or in a notebook, just write something.”

You see, although I’m not a full time author, needing to go out into the workplace in order to feed the ever-ravenous mortgage; I do get quite a bit of time off; time that I use to write. It would be very easy to just shut down and watch the box all day. Sometimes this is a real threat, sometimes a day or a week can go by when I dodge my word processing duties totally, but luckily they are rare. What I do find helpful though, as stated above, is to write something, anything - no matter how long. I know it sounds a little trite, but it works. Just by the action of sitting down and flipping to my writing work space on the computer seems to get the juices flowing. The very deed of typing one or two words seems to kickstart me into motion and before I know it, it’s lunch time.

But to be honest, I don’t just employ this system in the hope that at the end of ‘X’ number of days a novel will spit itself out of my computer. Generally, I set myself a daily word count and a number of days that I am going to write for. I usually set a target of two thousand words, and in most cases I reach and surpass this. I write approximately one thousand words in the morning. I then take a lunch break for an hour then sit down and do another thousand. That’s when I take a long tea break around mid-afternoon and think about what I’ve written. Then I go back to my computer and get it to read back everything I written that day. (I’m a committed dyslexia user - I won’t change what was broken in the first place). During this process I edit the days nonsense, adding and subtracting where needed. I find, during this read through, new ideas sprout from the most unlikely of sources and add considerably to the word count. Then at about six, I call a halt and descend the stairs to mix cocktails. It all seems so simple doesn’t it.

So how many words in total should I write? How long should my novel be? I actually did some research on this matter when I decided to turn my hobby into a published entity. And I didn’t like what I found. It seems, from one source or another, that a fiction paperback should be about seventy to eighty-five thousand words long. I discovered this fact when my first book, Havoc, was already into the high nineties and still going strong. I decided to ignore this rule, searching for a more alternative point of view that fitted my thinking more comfortably. That’s when I came across this quote - A novel should be as long as it needs to be to tell its story. That seemed far more up my street and it’s a quote I continue to stick by. Don’t get me wrong, and this might sound a little hypercritical, I know how I write and how long it’s going to be for me to tell a story. By counting the proposed chapters and using passed works as a guide, I generally aim for an edited manuscript being around the one hundred thousand word mark; this amount just seems to work for me. I set my sights and mash that keyboard till the job is done. There’s a thought - How long should a keyboard last in the hands of a writer? Perhaps that’s one for another day? See ya.

And yes, before you ask, I have the word count meter for this article turned on. Seven hundred and fifty-two.