Overall Word Count: Who Cares?
I've been dealing with a bit of writer's block - in the middle of a scene, no less. One evening it was there, clear and fresh in my head, and the next evening it was gone. I found I didn't know what came next. Everything was muddy and foggy. I went from effortlessly tossing off hundreds of words a day to a trickle, then to nothing. I never stopped thinking about the story - if anything, I've thought about it more obsessively than ever as I tried to figure my way out of this hole - but there simply seemed to be no good way forward.
By itself, that would not have been the end of the world: a speed bump, maybe, but not a brick wall. Yet I allowed it to become a brick wall, one that stopped me in my tracks for over a month. And in hindsight, the problem (and solution) were so obvious that I feel silly for having let it become such a problem.
An author friend of mine has said, both directly to me and on his blog, that writer's block is usually the result of the narrative taking a wrong turn somewhere, and that un-blocking oneself is usually as simple as retracing one's steps to find the point where a character, or plot development, caused things to go off the rails. Once the false trail is found, it's simply a matter of excising or rewriting the offending part, then going forward again. I have actually had that advice in mind since before I even sat down to begin writing this novel. Yet over the weeks and weeks that I've been here unproductive and frustrated, I never allowed myself to take that advice.
Then, in the course of an email conversation this week with a friend who was kind enough to check in on me and my apparent lack of progress, it hit me in a flash.
If you've followed this blog, you know that I've opened each entry with a word count of that day's work, and a running total so far. Word count was how I measured (and proclaimed) my progress. In light of that, I was very resistant to the idea of doubling back mid-course (and I'm actually further along than mid-course; I'm in the final act for sure) and maybe deleting some of my precious, obsessively counted words. In effect, I was embarrassed to have to come here to this blog and admit that my word count for the day was -4000, because I'd had to go back and chop out a whole chapter that didn't end up fitting.
It sounds silly, but there it is. And the more I think of it, the more puerile it seems to me. I'm writing a story, after all, not laying bricks. A story isn't done when you get to 50,000 words, or 100,000 or 300,000 for that matter. It's done when the story is done. To think otherwise would be to say that I'm not done growing yet, just because I never made it to six feet tall.
So that realization was a big weight off my shoulders. For the last two days I've been going forward and backward with equal vigor, moving the narrative ahead while also spending time revising past events to fit better with what I know now about my setting and story. Couldn't be easier.
I have two friends to thank for this: one who has gently but insistently pushed me forward this whole time, and another who's reminded me it's OK, necessary even, to go backwards sometimes. When this work is published, I fully intend to embarrass both of them by name in my acknowledgements.
Until next time, thanks for reading!
