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Post by Samantha on Jun 23, 2011 2:02:19 GMT
So I'm just curious, but do any of you writers out there check the word count of your stories? Back when I finished Delusion The Illusion, the count came up to about 22,000 (I'm editing it right now, so that will change, as is true for the title The title has changed!), placing it in the category of a novella. I regularly check my word count as I write. I've been rather unsuccessful in writing a novel (though I suspect that my first story, unfinished and very crappy, was somewhere around the 50,000 mark), and it's one of my goals over the next six months to do so. House of Cards will never make it there. I'm predicting it to be about ten chapters, and with the recently-finished Chapter Four, it's only at a total count of about 10,000.
So do any of you keep track like this, too? Feel free to post counts.
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Post by dragonaair on Jun 23, 2011 5:59:40 GMT
Well I tend to get side-tracked and usually never finish my stories. One that I'm working on that I would someday to be a published book is on chapter 2 and it's about 7000? words!
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Post by Zoe on Jun 23, 2011 6:28:21 GMT
I check word count after every chapter. I never really care while writing the chapter, but if it's a story for the Sims, I tend to write a lot then edit useless text out. I often write drabble, (a short fiction story containing exactly 100 words, though people loosely use it to define fiction stories less than 1,000 words.) so the word count is very tight with those. The longest I've written so far was about 25,000 words, but it was worth crap, so, bleh.
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Post by legrande on Jun 23, 2011 7:20:33 GMT
When I get bored when I'm writing I check my word count... Or after I finish for the day, I check it then. My most recent story was one for my school portfolio, called Over the Channel and it was meant to be 1200 words at most, and I managed to clock up a grand total of 2400(ish) and somehow I have to edit it down. *sigh* My longest piece of writing so far was 25 000 words for four chapters. It was completely terrible however. I shudder when I think about how bad it was. As yet, I haven't attempted another novel length story! I haven't actually done any proper word counts for my Sims stories (half of them are too bad!!) but I think I have around a 6000 word average per chapter for my latest one.
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Post by Amy (In America - Busy atm) on Jun 23, 2011 11:33:10 GMT
This made me curious, so I've just spent the last hour or so putting all my current sim story into one word document. It started out quite small with the first chapter being just a few thousand words, but then I slowly became more invested in the story, characters and writing, so each chapter gets substantially longer than the last. So, currently (there are two last chapters to go that aren't included in this), the whole story amounts to 81,359 words. And in size 11 Calibri, that's 146 A4 pages on word. Anyway, this is what it looks like:
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Post by legrande on Jun 23, 2011 15:35:40 GMT
Wow Amy! Just wow...! I would never be able to write that much, I'm pretty sure... Gosh, I'm so jealous! (But in a good way!!)
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Post by Amy (In America - Busy atm) on Jun 23, 2011 16:13:34 GMT
Lol! I never thought I would. It was really weird seeing it all together like that. I have to write it one chapter at a time, I'd never have the motivation to write the whole thing as is without slowly leaking bit by bit up. On the up-side, this makes Nanowrimo seem do-able, sort of
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Post by Samantha on Jun 23, 2011 18:37:01 GMT
Gosh, I'm so jealous! (But in a good way!!) Same here. I don't even know what to say. That's extremely impressive.
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Post by Zoe on Jun 23, 2011 20:16:51 GMT
So, currently (there are two last chapters to go that aren't included in this), the whole story amounts to 81,359 words. And in size 11 Calibri, that's 146 A4 pages on word. Holy-freakin' Tolito! That's quite impressive. That's more than three times what I've ever gotten.
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Post by dragonaair on Jun 23, 2011 21:59:26 GMT
Wow Amy! I am jealous of your determination. I usually get overwhelmed by the 'big picture' and scrap the story but you've motivated me.
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Post by Amy (In America - Busy atm) on Jun 23, 2011 22:08:36 GMT
Thank you guys I honestly don't know how that happened. I never really look at it in the long run, just take it chapter at a time, move on to the next and don't think ahead too much. I guess once you tough it out for a while (for me it was until chapter 6) you become quite heavily invested and just push through . I also think moving to wordpress helped, because before I used to think in terms of how many pictures I wanted to take (30 pictures = thirty paragraphs, probably 8 pages or less), but then when that element disappeared I don't know, just sort of got bigger and bigger
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Post by slurpee101 on Jul 24, 2011 22:33:23 GMT
Ah, I wish I can write that much for one story. I just never stick to one story for too long. I usually just use word count to see how long my chapters are. Sometimes if the word count is small I'll keep writing. Currently, I've never written something over 5,000 words.
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