My dear friend, Maeve Murray, recently blogged about the importance (or lack thereof) of word counts to a writer. You can check out her post here: http://maevemcmurray.com/2012/10/19/word-counts-boon-or-bane/
I agree with Maeve, to a degree. Just because a writer works more quickly or has more words in a story, does not make that writer/story better than others. Quantity, after all, is not quality. But when I'm working on a first draft, all I care about is getting words on the page. They probably aren't going to be the same words that will be there in my final draft, but I have to get the first draft done before I can worry about any other draft.
I like word counts because they give me a concrete and easily measurable goal. I can say to myself, "By the end of the month (or three months, or whatever) I will have written X number of words." Now, as Maeve points out, there's no guarantee that those words will be any good. In fact, they probably won't be. But it's a first draft. I'm not concerned with that yet. Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit," and I believe that. Short of Mozart, nobody comes writes something perfect the first time. Stories go through countless drafts and rewrites and revisions. But if I don't get that first draft down on paper, I can't fix it. Word counts give me a way to motivate myself to get that first draft done.
Without them, I flounder. If I don't have a deadline, if I don't know approximately how long my story is going to be, it doesn't get done. Even if the deadline is a self-imposed one, even if the story ends up needing to be longer or shorter, by giving myself a structure, I give myself a way to plan. "That's 2000 words a day," I say. "But I have plans this weekend, so I need to spread those words around ahead of time, etc. etc."
True, needing to fill up words and not finding inspiration, I have a tendency to go on long tangents and talk about nothing in particular. My first drafts feature long (often longer than I'd like) sections of filler that I end up having to pare down or even cut entirely.
And I'm fine with that.
While it's true that a NaNoWriMo novel (50,000 words in the month of November), or any other novel written in that mode, probably isn't going to be any good (I know mine aren't), that's OK. I hate to harp on this, but it's only a first draft. No one ever has to see it. But it still needs to get written. As Nora Roberts once said, "I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page."
So those are my thoughts. Even if the NNWM structure doesn't work for anybody else, it works for me. I need a concrete, quantifiable goal in order to get my first draft onto the page.
If only they had something like that for for the second draft...(and the ones after that...)
Many good points! It just goes to show how differently a writer's brain can function. Mine doesn't look at word counts at all. I instead will think to myself, "I'll finish this scene," or "I'll get to the part where this happens." But we each have our own way to get to where we need to be. :)
ReplyDeleteIndeed! Whatever gets those words on the page.
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