My god, it's full of words!

Hey, how are you doing?  I wasn't expecting you.  Really I wasn't expecting to be here myself, just popped my head in to do a few things and then go back to the ole novel.

But since we're both here, pull up a pew and I'll sputter more nonsense at you.  No, really, it's the least I can do after you went to the trouble of looking in on me.

I've always been in awe of writey-type folks who have a way with word count.  There I've said it and it feels so good to get it out there.  Yes, I am that shallow to see word count as a major part of writing, I can't help it, it's just the way my mind works.  People like Gary Gibson, Dean Koontz (sorry, I'm not going to send you to his website, it's too much selling and quite frankly his output in the last decade has been appalling), China Mieville and yes, even though I'm not a fan at all, Stephen King, among others.  Folk who can throw out four, five, six, seven, eight or more hundred page books with distressing regularity and, often quality (with the noted exceptions, of course).

It's not something I'm proud of and I hide the fact like a chronic masturbater who's hoping not be noticed cranking one out in a public toilet stall for the seventh time that day.

Word count isn't anything like a mark of quality in a work, yet from the time I started using a word processor and was given a way of tracking my word count, it became a compulsion to get higher and higher. You can't believe the sense of accomplishment the first time I broke the 100,000 word mark.  What I'd written was a colossal piece of shit, but I'd made it.  Then I saw that other authors regularly managed 160,000 words and more (and Stephen King has the crazy notion that 180,000 is 'goodish', like more is better...hang on a sec...DAMN YOU, KING , YOU BROKE ME!) and I looked at my paltry sum of words and I despaired.

There's no basis for this to be the case (except for that formative experience from On Writing, the best thing King has written, bar none and a recommended read despite what it's done to me) as some very good, classic books just squeak into novel-hood; the one that springs to mind is A Clockwork Orange, a great book that still has a pertinent message to this day.  That couldn't be more than 60,000 words, it puts my desperation to stack up them thar words as high as I can into perspective.

For a while there I didn't worry about it, since the books I was writing were hovering around that 100,000 word mark, and I was happy with that, I thought it was the best that I could do.  I still watched the word counts go up, but I didn't sweat it – if I got to it, great; if I didn't that was good too.  I'd hit a little bit of Zen in my writing.

Now I'm up to my hips in a new novel-writing project.  And going by what I've written so far and the detailed synopsis I've made (this is thanks to Gary Gibson, and I recommend doing this, it's a great way of seeing problems and mining new aspects of a story) it's going to be a fucking monster.  My estimates suggest it's going to be at least 180,000 words and probably more - if it ever sees print it will be a six hundred plus page doorstop.

And you'd think I'd be pleased with this, not a damn bit of it.  It's not huge just for the hell of it; the length is dictated by the story I want to tell. Instead I'm intimidated in a way I haven't been by writing for a very long time.  There's the fear that I'll fall short and make an arse of myself (to who? I dunno, that weird wee guy who's always looking over my shoulder when I'm writing...the one that's only in my head) or that I'll get to the heady heights of 200,000 words and discover I've written an unreadable slab of compressed shit. Normal, understandable fears, right?  Right?

Still the procession of words continues and the other fear I have rears its head. It's another fear that I've had from even before I started writing novels when I was fifteen - the terror that I'll run out of words, that the well of things to say will offer nothing more to me than a proverbial word bucket full of watery rat poo and kidney beans.  It's something that hasn't happened to me so far, but it's there in my mind like a blank-faced imp, saying, "This is what you've got to look forward to, Couper!  Ha ha ha!  Look at my impish wang and snivel!"

Or worse, it will cause me t snap one day and I'll spend the next few months adding 'u's to the giant 'duh' I've decided to put onto page after page in my brain-crippled state.

And that's where I am right now, fighting the ball-retracting fears that I'm going to tumble into dementia or that I'm continuing an exercise in self-deceptive incompetence.

Welcome to my happy writery world!  Aren't you glad you stopped by?  Why not have a custard cream?


Will