Okay, now that I’ve found my higher purpose, blah, blah, blah, it’s time to achieve it.
I have become one of those people who measures document length by word count, not pages. It finally makes sense to my brain. I think back to all the college papers where I used a large font size and wide margins in order to meet a certain page-based length requirement. Word counts can’t be manipulated. Well, I guess you could add bunch of superfluous words but that’s not my point.
So while apparently the answer to “how long should a novel be?” is “as long as it needs to be” the research I have done yielded the answer: 80,000-100,000 words for my genre.
It’s hard to measure art in quantitative terms, but I need benchmarks to move me beyond “write another chapter.”
After my intention setting classes, I decided to set a word count goal for my novel. I started New Year’s Day with approximately 40,000 words. The January goal is to get to 53,000. The February goal is to reach 66,000 and by the end of March, 80,000. From there I’ll assess whether the story is complete and then undertake the review and editing process. The point is to get the words out of my head and on paper.
As of tonight, I’ve written 56,500 words. I crushed the January goal. By the time I get to February, I might have to recalibrate the goals. There’s a higher purpose but there’s also a process. I might be making it up along the way but at least I’m on the road.
