An obsession with growth

As I write I am preoccupied by the word count. As a teacher I was often asked by students how many pages they should write. My stock response was that what mattered was the quality of what they wrote, rather than the quantity. I didn’t add that the less they wrote the less time it would take for me to mark. But the word count does matter for a book. A long book costs more to produce and might represent lower profits for a publisher; but if a book is too short and looks too thin on the shelf, it doesn’t seem like good value to a reader. And those are just the commercial considerations.

I spent six months re-writing my first book, Wild Rose, and shrinking it from about 90,000 words to less than 50,000 so that it would be appropriate for the 10+ age group. Losing words was not as difficult as I thought it would be and I was left with a much stronger manuscript. This time round, A Good Death is already on the smaller end of the scale for an adult book, so in re-writing I need to be careful to replace any words I lose.

The word count tool is a changeable friend. I seem to write for hours and it tells me I have only written a couple of hundred words. But at the end of a quick twenty minute session before supper it tells me I’ve written a thousand.  

Every week I check my baby book to see how big the baby is – this week it is about twelve centimetres. From what I have read, it will grow another centimetre every week. Like the word count, it seems to grow incredibly slowly, but in relative terms it’s remarkable. When I think that in its first weeks it was only millimetres long - that it came from something microscopic, I can only be amazed.

There’s no cure for my obsession with growth. I will continue to check the word count and measure the baby’s size against a ruler. I can try to speed up the growth of the book, but the baby will grow in its own good time.