Word Count: You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

"You gotta do what you gotta do, Baby."

by Louis Shalako

Word count is important because it shows whether you are working or not.

I like having ideas. When I get an idea, I write the story.

***

So how do you create a word count, big or small, for better or worse?

Allow me a bit of a brag.

So far in 2014 I have written eight stories and I have another 2,000 down on the next one. It’s only January fifteenth.

Those eight stories are at least 25,000 words and probably more. One of the stories was 4,300 words, and the shortest was still about 1,650. I’m writing science-fiction, erotic romance and even a spooky adventure snuck in there.

I’ve got two more story ideas. I create the file, name it and leave it on my desk-top. When I get a story done I submit it, (or post it on my blog) and at some point I stick it in a folder. I don’t always submit them right away. Right now I have three or four un-submitted stories, which have never appeared anywhere before. I don’t quite know what to do with them.

I’ve got four new ones under submission plus a handful of previous stories under review by pro, semi-pro or at least ‘pay’ markets.

In the past, I have sold the odd story.

I make no other claims.

Every so often I do give one away, for exposure. If nothing else, I can tweet about it, and post it on Facebook.

The story I am working on now will be worked on tomorrow. I reckon I can finish it up tomorrow. Why not? And then there are the next two stories. Got nothing better to do…

What I need more than anything is ideas.

When I run out of ideas, there are plenty of administrative things to do, but nothing is as satisfying as actually working with a story from beginning to end.

That’s what really does it for me.

I guess that’s why I’m here.

***

So in other words we work at it. It really is that simple.

We make the time. The actual writing is probably only good for two to four hours a day.

I have written two blog posts, (now three) one of which has been published, (now two) although the other needs a bit of work.  That one’s about Control.

I have formatted a new 5,000 word story for publication, complete with front and end matter, designed a book cover (marketing image) for it, got an ISBN number, written the blurb, etc.

In order to get the marketing image, I had to shop for it and then make ‘the cover’ using a simple paint program.

For the last little while, I’ve been uploading books to Google Play and Google Books. I do one or two a day as time permits.

One of my pen-names has a nice story coming out very soon. It will be published to Smashwords and all of their distribution channels, Kindle and OmniLit. Uploading a book can take ten or fifteen minutes. Everything takes a certain amount of time.

Other than that, I try to keep busy.

That’s how I get my word count.

I wouldn’t say it was easy,

I wouldn’t say it was hard.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

END

Practice Makes Professionals.

Nice lady. Please don't throw that at me.

by Louis Shalako

On Kindleboards someone asked, ‘Does haste affect the quality of the work?’

Comments mentioned some author friends posting big word counts on Facebook and the like, which people tend to do mostly during Nano-Month. (I’m up to ten or eleven thousand words for the year, by the way, by the time I’m done this post, and it’s only January 9.)

It’s a very good question.

The answer is yes and no, and I know how you all love that one.

What I kind of said on Kb was, ‘It depends on who’s doing it.’

Hopefully that wasn’t too snarky.

But, ah, please bear with me.

If you wrote ten stories in a year, say from two to four thousand words each, that represents from twenty to forty thousand words. In a year. In ten years, that would be anywhere from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand words, maybe from two to four books, or a bunch of shorter works.

Forget about past experience, mine or yours, forget about quality.

How much practice does it actually represent?

Speaking strictly in scientifically accurate terms, it represents 20,000 to 40,000 words of practice, no more and no less. Per year.

Ignore everything else. It’s just practice of the craft of writing—putting words down on paper, constructing sentences and paragraphs, (most of which should be almost subconscious or second nature at some point) and working with ideas.

Now think of the guy who grinds out twenty to forty thousand words a month. Some of it is crap. That might never be published. Some of it’s okay. It might end up being self-published or given away for exposure, it might go in a contest, he might publish it on a blog or website, under a girl’s name even.

What does he care? He likes the work. He’ll tackle any genre at some point just to see if he can do it, or just to have some fun with it and do something different, something no one else dared do because they were worried that somewhere out there in the world, there would be one person who didn’t much care for that author. They didn’t like a certain book or story.

Well, big deal. After a few years, we have the right to forget all that. We can move on.

Twelve months times twenty thousand words is two hundred forty thousand words…of practice, per year, if we give the guy credit for nothing else. He’s also publishing more often. He also problem-solving and trouble-shooting more often, creating more marketing images, writing more blurbs, typing in more meta-data, reading more blog posts on writing, publishing, craft…

It all adds up over time in a cumulative fashion.

Within one year he has twelve times as much experience as the guy (or girl) who writes twenty to forty thousand words a year.

That’s like twelve years of ‘experience.’

And with practice, and with experience, and no doubt, in some small way, with some confidence in the result, quality actually improves—it does not diminish with practice or experience.

It can only get better, in that sense practice is not a zero-sum game. Because so many different learning curves come together—developing a work ethic, studying other masters, listening to them talk, watching what the real pros do, and more than anything, writing story after story and book after book creates quality because it creates skill. To practice all the different aspects of self-publishing results in knowledge, skills and experience that are greater than the sum of all the individual parts.

I’ve been writing for over thirty years. Most of the progress has come in the last four or five years. But then, in the last four or five years I wrote my ass off, and it shows.

For too many years I pecked away at this and that project and dreamed of a future that sure as hell wasn’t going to be coming around and knocking on my door.

I had to go out into the world, take some risks and meet Fate halfway at least.

And now I’m knocking on your door. Because in ten years, I will probably write a minimum of five million words! It might even be more than that.

That is a veritable shit-load of books and stories, ladies and gentlemen.

I have every expectation of being pretty good at it, at some point—and let the critics fall where they may.

END