McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Wordcount!
Dom:
Let's see...early december, I was at 43,000. Early May I'm at 51,000. So, 8000 words in 6 months. Man, I suck. A thousand words a month.
I guess I do have 2 fanfics too I've been tossing out, one at 7227 words at the moment, one at 6566. So if you count that I've done 21,793 words in 6 months. Plus the snippits of other brewing stories. If I'm being generous to myself, I could say 3000+ words a month. Which still sucks.
::feels bummed now she's done the math::
skaoi:
Hmmm....my co-author and i seem to have an issue with verbosity. We're at chapter 25, passing 120K words with no sign of stopping any time soon. Lots of editing to do, but, to tell the truth, I only see the editing process adding to the count.
recentcoin:
As the aforementioned co-author, I can tell you that I have always been verbose. It takes a lot of words to create an accurate mental picture for someone else, so I spend a lot of words creating mood and giving descriptions. I think that this is especially important in a fantasy setting, since there are no preconceived notions. If I say "grocery store", you get an immediate mental image of aisles, shopping carts, produce section, the smell of coffee from the coffee aisle, the horrid fluorescent lighting, etc. There isn't a lot of description required for you to understand "grocery store". But I say, "Drow campsite" and you don't necessarily know what a drow is, do you have any idea of what that looks likes? smells like? what the "vibe" is like? No, you do not and in order to make a reader understand that, you have to explain that to them.
One of my central characters is a tiefling. He's an escaped slave who's grandfather was a very powerful demon. I go to a fair amount of trouble to show his strengths, his weaknesses, and his trials with his own very real "inner demon". I think that's more important to explaining to the unfamiliar what a tiefling is than waving a drawing at them and saying "demon". Now, the question becomes how to do this in a few words and the short answer is that you can't. It takes words on the paper. If you leave too many blanks, you don't really tell the whole story. My problem is that character creation comes easily to me. Even my background characters have elaborate back stories. One of my background characters is a housekeeper. Her back story is almost as elaborate as the main PC's even though I've not written it down.
Cyclone Jack:
The first/rough draft of my novel is DONE! *pops champagne!*
It clocks in at just over 93,000 words. I'm estimating that second and third drafts will add a good 35,000-40,000 to it. But the skeleton and all the major scenes are there.
To be honest, I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how the thing ended. I'm happy that there is no set up for any sort of sequel, though. All through the last 20 k I was afraid my brain was going to take the easy path and leave an out. Nope.
Forcing myself to bang out 2000 or more words a day focused on a single story was an interesting experience and it taught me a lot about how my brain worked:
My brain is a sneaky, seditious, rebellious asshole.
For example, three times in the writing process I found myself thousands of words into completely unrelated short fiction. I generally didn't realize this until I was past the point of no return. While this annoyed me by slowing the novel-writing down, I must admit that all three stories are pretty damn good. They're also things I would never have written conciously and without the nebulous atmosphere of the novel in progress and its many strange themes and characters.
The longest (and best, IMO) veers scarily close to erotic fantasy. It would be erotic fantasy in fact, if not for the fact that I refuse to write sex scenes. Instead, The Queen Of Summer is something much better: a tale of loyalty, a paen to the wild summers of my youth, and a tribute to young people defying authority in an organic, deeply felt, utterly unplanned manner. Stylistically, it may be the best thing I've ever written.
The other two are more traditional horror stories. While I consider both clever, they'll be tossed to the back of the pile for polishing and tweaking.
While I may never conciously sit down to write another novel (the process, for the most part, was maddening. The continuity alone is going to take me months to sort out. Thankfully, I'll have help with that. ), I might jump into the process again just for the framework to write more short fiction.
Tasmin21:
Congrats on finishing!
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