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With National Novel Writing Month (aka Nanowrimo) wrapped up (heck no I didn’t participate, though it feels like I did- 29,000 new words added to my manuscript in the past couple of weeks!), it seems an apt occasion to explore what’s good and bad about the word count goal.

The Word Count Goal Is Great

On its face, it just makes sense. It’s the easiest possible way to quantify writing and measure progress. Most people are accustomed to the idea of putting in [X] hours of effort, and having something tangible to show for it afterward. For writers, words on paper are that something.

There’s a sense of accomplishment that comes with reaching a goal. The goal motivates you- heck, it forces you- to keep moving forward and adding new stuff, rather than churning over what’s already been written. This can be really helpful for a first draft, especially: plow forward, don’t look back. It’s pretty much the entire point of Nanowrimo.

Once you reach your goal, you can also safely feel like you’re done writing for the day, instead of spending the rest of the day fretting about whether you’ve really completed enough.

The Word Count Goal Sucks

There’s pressure to keep moving forward, no matter what. You may not be happy with the last scene. Too bad- full speed ahead! Thousands of more words to go!

Then later, it hits you: you know how to fix that scene! But oh, no- you’re gonna have to rewrite that, and thousands of words thereafter, because of all the changes that fix introduces.

That’s a lot of wasted effort. A little more initial planning before writing may have prevented it- but if all you care about is [X] words by the end of the day, taking time to plan and think feels like time wasted rather than time saved. There’s incentive to leave mediocre stuff the way it is, because changing it will be a hassle that won’t make much of a dent in your daily goal, and may even reduce your word count.

All of this boils down to the fact that the word count goal makes you focus on quantity over quality.

I once wrote a Java program that pulled 50,000 random words from a dictionary and wrote them to a single text file. That’s a 100% valid novel by Nanowrimo standards. Why wouldn’t it be? All Nanowrimo cares about is 50,000 words. It doesn’t matter what words they are, or whether they tell a good story or amount to haphazard garbage.

Approximately zero good novels are banged out start-to-finish in one draft, but Nanowrimo ignores that. The stated goal is to “COMPLETE a 50K word novel in one month.” It should be to “DRAFT a 50K word novel in one month.”

Verdict?

The word count goal can be very helpful for getting your initial thoughts down quickly- as long as you understand you’ll almost certainly be plowing back through and improving upon what’s there in one or more (realistically, eighty) future passes.

Once you’re out of the first-draft phase, it’s time to stop counting words and start focusing on cohesion and quality. If you really need to measure progress by something, you could always switch to scenes- like, “I want to have this scene ironed out by the end of the week.”

Are there other reasons you love or hate the word count goal? Feel free to drop a line in the comments!