In the novel Writers & Lovers by Lily King, when a character talks about how their writing is going, they speak in terms of how many pages they’ve written. In one scene, a novelist describes her ex-boyfriend, also a writer, begging for a second chance. The ex hasn’t even started writing his book, but the dumped novelist has written two hundred and sixty pages since he left. Their respective page count is how we know she will never take him back.
In another scene, our main character, Casey, asks another writer, George, about the story he’s working on.
“’How long have you been working on it?’
‘Three years.’
‘Three years?’ I don’t mean for it to come out like that. ‘It must be more of a novella by now.’
‘It’s eleven and a half pages.’”
When George tries to ask her out, she thinks: “I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”
Pages are one thing, though, and words are another. I prefer word count. A page could be sloppily handwritten in a pocket notebook or in a 10 pt font single-spaced with the tiniest possible margins. A page could mean anything! Word count is the only measure by which I can meaningfully chart my progress.
At the beginning of the month, I joined a group of writers led by Nina Semczuk for an April NaNoWriMo in order to get back to work on the fourth or fifth draft of the novel I’ve been working on. I did NaNoWriMo back in November but hadn’t worked much on the novel since. As I found then, the external accountability of sharing my word count is obviously the special sauce I need. This latest draft is going much better than I expected.
I usually track my word count in my own spreadsheet, but for this round I’m only using the spreadsheet shared with the group. I keep a sticky note on my desktop with the total word count I have to reach and how much I’ve done so far today. Whenever I feel the urge to quit a writing session early, I update the day’s count. Seeing the number helps me push onward. I’m like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every word count update, hungry for that feeling of accomplishment in reaching that daily goal.
My goal for the month is 55,000 words. As of today I have 38,511 words. In Google Docs, using the font Spectral Normal at 12 pt with 1.5 line spacing, 6 pt before and after every paragraph, indenting the first line of each paragraph, without page breaks between chapters, with 1 inch margins, that’s 82 pages.
(I used to just type into Google Docs without changing a thing, but I recently decided to switch up the formatting from draft to draft as a visual reminder to create something new and better instead of just rehashing what came before. Each draft looks a little different from the last one, even aside from all the different words in it.)
I feel validated when I read about writers like Fran Lebowitz who also fixate on how much one writes in a day, not discriminating between page and word count:
“I’m not interested in the thoughts or ideas of these people, I only want to know how many pages a day they wrote. I don’t know many writers. … But as soon as I meet any, as soon as I can figure out that it’s not too intimate a question to ask them, which is about six seconds after I meet them, I say, How many words do you write a day?”
Even better is recognizing the importance of word count in someone else’s writing process, demonstrated in this story Lebowitz tells about a man at Sotheby’s showing her an original Mark Twain manuscript:
“He showed it to me. A short story. He was telling me about the manuscript and where they found it and everything.
He said, I’m pretty knowledgeable about Twain but there’s one thing we don’t understand. We’ve called in a Twain scholar.
I said, What is that?
He said, See these little numbers? There are these little numbers every so often. We just don’t know what those are.
I said, I do. I happen not to be a Twain scholar but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place. He was counting the words.
The Sotheby’s man said, What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!
I said, I bet you anything. Count. I don’t want to touch it, smudge up this manuscript. You know, like the sign says, you break it, it’s yours.
He counted the words and saw I was right. He said, Twain must’ve been paid by the word.
I said, It may have nothing to do with being paid by the word. Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words each day and he would wonder, Am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car — are we there yet?”
Like a little kid in the back of a car, like one of Pavlov’s dogs — perhaps there is something instinctive and primitive about making word count the thing that gets you through the writing day. The work itself can be rewarding too, but only when you’re deep in it, not when you surface and wonder if it’s time for dinner, if it’s time to get up and pour yourself a drink. That’s the moment when you check your word count and figure out how much more you have to do. You catch that refreshing little breath, and then you dive back in.