(no subject)

[yuuago]

Oh my god, I just figured out how to hide the wordcount in Word's status bar.

I'm going to be unstoppable.

Not that I want it gone permanently, but sometimes I find it more efficient to write when the wordcount isn't staring me in the face. Gets me less hung up on fiddly things.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

But anyway, every writer I know mentions about the "wordcount" working as a weird pressure or like the metric of success?

If you feel like answering this, I'd just like to know what the wordcount means and does to a writing artist :D


This might be a silly question, but I'm not a writer myself... Artist in some sense, yeah, just not as good a writer :)

Thanks if you decide to take the time on this! I'm fascinated

[yuuago]

No problemo!

Hmmm....

It's kind of hard to describe it concisely, so I'll just list a few reasons why writers might get hung up on wordcount:

+They're writing a story that requires specific length parameters, and are preoccupied with making sure it isn't too short or too long
+They have a general plan for how long the story should be, but then it turns out to require more than expected (such as more scenes, more characters) and they're left going "Why is it so long, how did this happen?!" - this development can potentially cause some difficulties, such as ending up with bad stylistic choices (bloated writing) or subplots that you need to either resolve or remove
+Some readers are very vocal about not reading anything under (insert arbitrary wordcount number here), and the writer may be worried they will lose readers if they don't write a longer story
+Some readers are very vocal about not reading anything over (insert arbitrary wordcount), and the writer may be worried that their readers will think the long story is bloated
+They get weirdly picky about having the wordcount display as a solid round number, like 1000 instead of 873 (it just LOOKS neater, OKAY -> this is silly but sometimes brains are silly)
+They are worried that their skills will stagnate if they don't write (insert arbitrary number of words) within (insert arbitrary duration of time)
+They're trying to set a goal to write a story of a certain length, or write a certain amount of words in a specific length of time, just to stretch themselves and see if they can accomplish that (NaNoWriMo encompasses both these things)

The only equivalent that I can think of with visual art like... Well, I've seen people who are very determined to work on drawing for a certain number of hours per day, and they get stressed out if they can't. Or to fill up a certain amount of sketchbook pages in a certain amount of time, and they get stressed out if they don't manage that. And of course there are some events that I guess could be equivalent to the timed wordcount challenges - Inktober, for example... "do one ink drawing per day for a month" goal vs NaNo's "write 1667 words per day for a month" goal.

With regard to this particular entry and the story that I had in mind when I wrote it, the reason I wanted to turn off the automatic wordcounter is: I wrote a story that is much longer from that I usually manage; over 6000 words, vs my usual under 999 words. I'm really proud that I managed to write a longer story, because it happens very rarely. But I haven't edited it yet, and I can already see some issues where I might need to rewrite things to make them more concise, and maybe even take out whole paragraphs. So... if I can make sure that the length isn't staring me in the face from the corner of the screen, I think it'll be easier; I will be able to trick my brain into not worrying about how long it is or isn't, and just focus on making sure it's as good as possible, even if I have to cut it down a lot.

One thing you mentioned: the metric of success... I guess it is that way, yeah. Like, when I manage to write a longer story, one can see right away that I put a lot of time into it. If I write a 300-word drabble sequence, nobody is going to know that I spent four weeks agonizing over the linebreaks and trying to make the diction in the dialogue precisely right. But if I write a 12000 word story, it'll take a long time to do it, and it will be immediately obvious. It's also more challenging, too, because usually a lot more stuff is happening in a story like that; even if there isn't much plot, it usually at least includes more than one scene. So... writing something like that, and finishing it - that's one way to measure success, yeah.

Of course, this is just my way of seeing it. Probably other people would give you different answers.

Does that clear it up a bit?