As we enter the second half of NaNoWriMo, I find myself thinking about word counts. My personal word count has always been pretty high on days that I write, but I don’t write every day. That makes a 30 day writing challange very difficult for me. We’re halfway through the challenge and many days are marked 0. It confuses the website tracker, and makes me feel like I’m failing, even when I know I can catch up in a heartbeat. So I sat down with the intention of figuring out exactly how I could remedy this problem, and I came up with the following.
There are two main ways to increase you word count when writing. Unfortunately, they contradict each other.
Way 1: Don’t care about your writing.
If you have no emotional interest in your writing (paper for school, article for money) then finishing it becomes the only goal. When you are doing any activity just to finish it, that activity gets done much faster than otherwise. This is known as “Quantity over quality”, and is the motto for many companies that exist today. It’s how a writer can publish a new Novella every week without fail.
The downside to this is that quailty isn’t even a part of the equation using this method. That leaves this method ideal for First Drafts, but completely useless for final products.
Way 2: Be passionate.
The exact opposite of the first method. If you are extremely passionate about what you’re writing, the words will just flow to the page with little effort. It’s why I can write a blog post when I feel like crap and don’t want to write. It’s why the first few scenes you write for any project are so much easier than the rest.
The downside to this is that you can’t control your passion. No matter how hard you try, the passion comes and goes as it pleases.
So what do you do? That isn’t an easy answer. There are many little tricks to increase word count, and you should try them out for yourself, but the two main ways are very dependant on how much you care about a project. Chances are, if you only rely on passion, you’re never going to finish anything, but you’ll have a lot of projects. (I speak from experience here) On the other hand, if you never care about what you’re writing, it can never be worth reading.
The best idea I can come up with is compromise. Always write when passion strikes, but force yourself to not care during first drafts. The point of a first draft isn’t to be good anyway, right? Use that to your advantage, and pump out the base story as fast as possible. Then take your time and make it good, even if that means writing a bit slower. Word count shouldn’t be a priority on later drafts anyway. By the time you make it to a fifth draft, the book is about as long as its ever going to be, so don’t worry about that.
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