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  • Kris Ashton

Don’t let word count envy ruin your life


There are more than the usual number of reasons to read the latest edition of Australia’s longest-running speculative fiction journal, Aurealis.

The most self-serving and therefore important reason is a review of my novel Invasion at Bald Eagle by author and editor, Megan Kelly. Hers is the first review that really seems to understand the book’s structure, setting and interplay between characters. So a big thanks to Megan, and to Aurealis reviews editor Eugen Bacon for including it in issue #118.

The other somewhat atypical reason to grab Aurealis #118 is Michael Pryor’s editor’s letter. Before I explain why, I want to provide some background.

In recent months, I followed more writers on Twitter in a bid to become more ‘immersed’ in its writing community. Sure beats wading through the usual political posts about climate change, Donald Trump, and identity politics, I thought. What I noticed emerging, however, was a somewhat unhealthy obsession with daily word count.

Many years ago, I developed a serious case of ‘word envy’ as it related to vocabulary. While I have a tested passive vocabulary around the 95th percentile, my active vocabulary is nowhere near as reliable. Part of my editing process involves mulling over certain lines and trying to determine what word I *really* wanted during composition. An extension of this was reading other writers’ work and turning a shade of green at the effortless way plain-English but colourful words just seemed to spill across the page.

Then one day, I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing for about the billionth time and read the passage where he compares Hemingway’s use of vocabulary to more a verbose writer such as Lovecraft. It made me understand that obsessing about what other writers could or couldn’t do was time wasted. I’ve honestly never given it another thought.

The same applies to word count. Ironically, I blame King for the rise in word-count envy. His adjuration that 2,000 words should be the daily minimum for any serious writer has led to a great deal of unnecessary angst for those who just aren’t so prolific. The rule should be, “Set aside time for writing and write as much as you possibly can in that period.” Whether that’s 500 words or 5,000 words doesn’t matter, in my opinion. Getting something down on the page is the important thing.

As Pryor points out in his editor’s letter, every author has his or her own routine, pace, quirks. If you’re an aspiring author, my advice is to stop worrying about what everyone else is doing and just find out what works for you. Write at different times, in different places, with a different drink at hand. Aim for total silence or put on music. Use a laptop or write longhand. Hell, goad yourself with other authors’ Twitter feeds, if that works. How you aim for that daily word count doesn’t matter. Just that you do.

It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn over the past five years. Since beginning full-time work in 1998, I had always done my best writing during my daily train commute – 500 words in either direction for a minimum daily total of 1000. (Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less. Let’s say it again: Getting something down on the page is the most important thing.) But once my daughter came on the scene and I had to begin commuting by car, my regular writing time vanished.

I got by on a jerry-rigged arrangement of writing during any downtime; quiet periods at work, waiting for a flight at the airport, etc. While that sort of piecemeal, chop-and-change approach to composition was okay for short stories, I found it almost impossible to write novels. Prior to my daughter’s birth in 2013 I typically completed one novel a year. In the five years to the end of 2018 I finished exactly one (which took nearly three years) and had false starts on two others. I began to contemplate giving away novel-writing altogether. But that made me sad, especially with Invasion at Bald Eagle performing quite well. So I did what I should have done a lot sooner and discussed it with my wife.

A good spouse is brutal when necessary. After listening to me moan about my predicament, she pointed out that I watched a couple of hours of Netflix every evening after dinner. But that was my downtime, I rejoindered. She didn’t flinch. Lots of parents working full time had their own hobbies and projects, she said. Did I know when they did them? In the evening, after they had put the kids to bed.

She was right, of course, and I felt like a total fool because I had more or less offered my wife the same advice about finding time for exercise a few months earlier. Time is inflexible, therefore life must be about priorities. If writing really mattered to me, I needed to bump out something to make room for it. So now I watch Netflix while I’m eating dinner and then devote as much of the period between 7:45pm and 9pm to writing as necessary. And – big surprise! – I’m much happier in myself.

Sometimes writing is stressful, but it should only be sometimes. If you’re in constant agony about it, maybe it’s time to review your routine and make a few changes.

Deleting the Twitter app on your phone could be a good start.

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