How I Think About Word Count

It’s necessary, yes, but it’s not the end-all-be-all…

Lots of writers always talk about how you shouldn’t focus on word count, that this should be something you enjoy, but the fact of the matter is that to get a novel, you need at least a specific number of words. And that’s daunting. But trust me, if you break it off in small chunks, it really becomes quite easy.

Let me explain: I’m working on a novel right now, that I’m hoping to send to a traditional publisher. For this novel, I created a sort-of-detailed outline, that still gives me a lot of freedom to veer a little off track. Through research, I’ve found that a novel should have at least 60,000–70,000 words. And so using that, I created a 16-chapter outline, reasoning that, then, I would only need to write about 3,750 to 4,375 words a chapter. And if I write 2,000 words a day, I’ll have a first draft in a month or so.

Now, don’t get me wrong — writing 2,000 words a day is hard. Some days, I’m just satisfied with 1,000. Today, I wrote a little over 2,000 words, 2,031 to be exact, and I’m leaping. As of now, I have 11,790 words in my novel. It’s hard, because I’m a perfectionist, and so I’ve already written almost four versions of my first chapter (I started writing the first draft August 20).

So my advice to you: break it up in chunks, remember that even a sentence is a sentence more than you had before, but that a novel won’t write itself, and I know that someday it’ll happen. I know it’ll happen for me.

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