A Few Confused Words about Word Count

There is, I’ve discovered, no math quite like word count math.

Everyone has their own ideas about how to figure out the number of words in a novel, most of which appear to be half guesstimation, half page-calculation, a quarter magical-thinking, and three-fourths chaos theory—and, yeah, I know that adds up to more than it should.

That’s sort of my point.

Some of the places I’ve checked (agent-sites among them) say that one is never supposed to use MSWord’s counting tool, because it doesn’t account for the length of the word— ‘a’ is the same as ‘acidophilus,’ which doesn’t help anyone figure out how many pages a the published book is likely to be.    Still others (agent-sites among them) say, go ahead and use Word, because the number is only supposed to give an agent a general idea of whether your novel is too long or too short for the genre.

Some guides advise to calculate by character count (with or without spaces) divided by X or Y; or by double-spaced page count (factoring in the half-pages and white spaces); or by rounding some unclear figure one way or another.   And some appear to go by the light of the gibbous moon, under which they consult the spirit of Einstein, who reassures them that it’s all relative (even the spaces).

Word says I have a 102,500-word Pigeon (give or take 35 words) on my hands—that seems like a pretty big bird, even if none of those words is ‘acidophilus.’*  According to the 250-word per page theory, though, it’s about 106,250.**  If I count the characters-plus-spaces and divide by six, it’s 94,317.

The moon is gibbous now, I think, but I’ve been too busy to gambol about, sorry—but if I calculate the characters without spaces and stipulate that each weighs as much as a single saffron thread, Pigeon weighs in at about six pounds, twelve and a half ounces.

I’m just saying.

As someone who was naively hoping that the math part of this writing business might be taken care of by agents, personal accountants, and possibly Swiss banking establishments—a woman can dream—I’ll admit I’m a bit . . . confused.

Of course, I’ll be checking submission guidelines very carefully when the time comes and I really shouldn’t be worrying about any of this, yet—if at all, supposing Einstein and the Pro-Word contingent are to be believed.  At this point, I haven’t truly started cutting any deadwood darlings, being more interested in untangling the timeline, making sure I nail down that one FBI agent who has a different name every time he’s mentioned, and jumping up and down on the structural integrity of the thing.

And it really isn’t necessary to know where the word-count stands before I pick up the axe, because what I’m supposed to do is take away all the things that aren’t part of the story and whatever length I have afterward is the right length for the book.***

It’s a theory, anyway.

There might be another theory that I’m trying to recalculate the word count in my favor so my beloved Chapter Four won’t fall victim to literary downsizing . . . but that’s just the gibbous moon talking.

What’s your favorite^ One True Way of calculating word count?  Does it involve goats and pixie dust?

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*I did use ’a’  2473 times, though, in case you were wondering—I was, so I won’t judge you or anything.  However you feel about MSWord’s literal interpretation of word count, it also easily counts and highlights all the times I’ve used ‘just’, ‘which’, “—“ or any of my other charming, semantic tics—which is just darned useful at times.

**For those of you who just hissed through your teeth, I didn’t bother looking for white space—and y’all know by know how much I love long stretches of dialogue—so this is an inflated figure.   Again, sort of the point.

***At least until an agent or editor hands me a list of revisions.  I’m not that naive (just really, really hopeful)

^Not logical, just favorite.

Random Thursday: Write this down . . .

Random Thursday (ˈrandəm ˈTHərzdā):  the day on which Sarah plunks down all the odd bits and pieces she’s acquired during the week in an effort to avoid writing a real post, the assembly of which usually ends up taking twice as much time as actually sitting down and creating real content.

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oooooOOOOOooooo

Twenty Years is a long time to wait for one sentence . . .

. . . unless you’re John Irving.

oooooOOOOOooooo

So, You Want to FTF?

Zoë Sharp, who is one of my favorite author-people,  interviewed Timothy Hallinan—author, instructor, blogger, cool guy—the other day on Murderati,* one of my favorite author-people places.

It was mentioned that Mr. Halligan  teaches courses on how to start and finish novels and had gathered his thought on the subject in one place on his website.

So I clicked over to check them out.  I read one or two of his articles . . . then a few more. . . and then  . . .

I bookmarked the page, closed out and started writing.

They’re that good.

And they’re right here.

oooooOOOOOooooo

Nice One, Kid . . .

These are the earrings I picked up for myself at the Mall on Sunday while I was trying to ignore Janie.

“Those are perfect for you, Mom!” said Janie, as I was paying for everything.

“Why?” said Sunny, momentarily distracted from her new yellow flower purse.**

“Because they’re little pencils,” said Janie.  “And she’s a . . .”

“A Mommy?”

“No.  Well, yeah, but she writes stuff.  And writers need . .  .”

“Erasers?”

oooooOOOOOooooo

Garrison Keillor says I can write fanfiction about Pirate Ninja Nuns from Mars***

So there, nyah.

oooooOOOOOooooo

Social anxieties and spontaneous credit card combustion be damned—I registered for Bouchercon last night.

I also scored accommodations, though not quite what I’d wanted.  The convention center has already sold out of the reserved block—the only room available in the hotel, if the reservation person was to be believed, was a three-person suite for $339 a night, which was tempting . . . but no.

I booked a room a block away and will frugally, if not cheerfully, schlep myself and my stuff back and forth.

So the only things I’m missing are a signed vacation slip^ and transportation, since my beloved Rocinante is in no shape to make the trip and I’d rather not fly if I can help it.^^

So if anyone within reach of this post hails from my part of the Midwest and plans to go to Bouchercon—or has always hankered to explore scenic Cleveland, it’s not my place to judge^^^—I’ll pay my share of gas and parking if you want to carpool or guard your stuff if you want to train- or buspool.

And if any of my posse are interested in sharing expenses for a suite . . .

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*While you’re there, check out the amazing Q&A by Gar Harwood and Brad Parks.  Two brilliant men riffing off each other—priceless.

**It should be noted that she was sitting on the counter through this exchange because she refused to be parted from her new favoritest thing ever long enough for the clerk to scan the tag.

***Because I miss the Biker Mice, that’s why.

^I have to wait for the quarterly forms to come out, but it shouldn’t be a problem.  If it is, I’ll either cancel or hold one heck of a poetry contest.

^^It’s not fear, it’s impatience,  disgust, and expense, pretty much in that order.

^^^Though I’ll do it anyway, since I was born and (more or less) raised in Cincinnati, which means judging Cleveland is a deeply ingrained tradition.  But I hear the river up there is gorgeous now that it’s no longer bursting into flame on a regular basis . . . and for Laura, I’ll keep quiet—if she promises not to bring up the Reds or the Bengals or Jerry Springer or Mapplethorpe . . . never mind.

Backstory: From Cardboard to Who Cares?

Of the many, many webcomics* I follow, Sheldon, by the talented and beyond-awesome Dave Kellett, is probably my favorite.  Janie loves it, too, and often requests that we read one of our many printed collections of the strip as her bedtime story.

It’s fun—we do the voices.

One of the reasons I love this comic is that the author is as big a geek as I am and riffs on all the cultural icons of geekdom, up to and including Star Wars, Star Trek, and, of course Lord of the Rings.**

Last night, we landed on this strip:

Click the image above and read through the arc—it’s six strips long, ending on this one:

Exaggeration aside, you know damn well that Tolkien knew the backstory of every single creature in LOTR, down to what each one had for breakfast—and second breakfast—the morning of the battle of Minas Tirith.  Even Tom Bombadil.

Writers are told to create a backstory for our characters, too—even if the character is a minor one.  Alison Janssen wrote a gorgeous post illustrating why:

Think about your character like this: He is a very small ocean when he’s young and inexperienced. As he moves through time and experiences life, the coasts surrounding him widen, and the sea floor drops. His ocean gets bigger as his character grows, containing more saltwater.

Now think about the formative events of his life — the stuff that happened to him before the story you’re telling in your manuscript. The kinds of things that led to the quirks and traits he possesses in the story you’re telling . . .   Imagine each of those events as a drop of colored liquid in the character ocean. The larger the impact of the event, the larger the drop, and the more viscous the liquid . . .

And it’s not just the immediate, most recently dropped pool of liquid that will inform your character’s actions, behaviours, and perceptions. Every drop of liquid, even when dispersed, will have changed the overall makeup of the character ocean. Wave patterns, currents, the flora and fauna — everything’s related.

This is heady stuff for writers!  Whether you make it up on the spot or your characters tell you more about themselves as you go, characterizations are nothing but fun.  And we’ve all become wary of cardboard characters and flat characterizations.  There needs to be something behind those baby blues, right?

BUT . . .

While Tolkien wrote in almost every possible historical, genealogical, and personal detail for his characters—including Tom Bombadil—it was the early 1950s. And he was Tolkien.

Currently, we aren’t supposedto use a character’s entire backstory—unless that’s what the story is about—because an infodump slows  the pace to a crawl while the reader tries to process everything,  like a kid trying to eat a sundae through brain freeze.  It can be done, but it’s not as enjoyable as usual.  And most backstory isn’t important to anyone but the characters and their anxious parent author.  It’s natural for us to want our babies to show off for the nice people, but that’s not the point.

Naturally, it depends on the audience—ten-year olds like Sheldon up there have a low boredom threshold, while professors of 19th Century Delphinapterus literature seem to have quite a high tolerance—as well as the needs of the story.   And I’m not discounting talent and skill; some authors seem to effortlessly balance any amount of backstory—or none at all.

J.K. Rowling works a couple of tons of personal backstory into Harry Potter, especially the last volume, but it doesn’t slow anything down at all—she  keeps up the pace because the details are relevant and immediately useful  to the plot.

In The Key, Averil Dean weaves the relationship between Elizabeth and her late father into the first several chapters, but these memories and details aren’t infodumpy or extraneous—they establish the character’s loneliness and explains how and why Elizabeth views the world the way she does, which also influences her actions when strange things start happening.  The details are relevant.

Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s premiere detective, raises orchids.  It’s one of  his signature character traits—his entire schedule revolves around his greenhouse.  I’ve read all of his adventures, but I don’t believe there’s any mention of why he loves these flowers so. Stout supplies a lot of Wolfe’s backstory,  but I’ve yet to find an outright explanation for this.^  Yet the orchids aren’t just a surface gimmick:  orchids are as fussy, particular, and agoraphobic as Wolfe himself, and serve as a reflection of himself, even to his preference for bright yellow.  Wolfe without his orchids would be Wolfe lessened.

BUT . . .

While I may find it fascinating that my MC likes flavored coffees because her first sensei used to brew hazelnut-mocha coffee  in the back of the dojo and the scent has become a sign of safety and comfort,***  interrupting the story to mention this isn’t going to help things along.

Her coffee preference is a good personal detail (at least in my opinion), but while  the reason might matter to the character—if she would even remember it— it doesn’t matter to the story, and wedging it in there wouldn’t work.  She’s not the kind of person to share this kind of personal information, or naturally ponder it so the readers will catch on.  In the end, the why doesn’t matter.

It’s enough that after tough days, she always makes a pot of hazelnut-mocha,  and breathes in the steam before relaxing.  And doesn’t give a damn if her co-workers wrinkle their noses.

___

*Or  my “four-paneled” soap operas, as I call ‘em.

**But not, to my relief, sparkly vampires.   Bless you, Dave Kellett!

***I just made that up, but why not?

^If there is one, please let me know—and cite the story, please!

You can pick your friends. And you can pick your locks. But . . .

It appears to be a hard and fast Writing Rule that you should write what you know.

Don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to write what I intuit up to the point where I start using algebra—”She used X to pop the Y lock on the Z”—and then set forth to learn what I should know about what I’m writing.

Among the stuff I’ve learned so far:  You can fit two bodies or 540 cartons of cigarettes into the trunk of a ’78 Chevy Nova.  Always drop the mag before you clear the chamber.  Barbesol shaving cream takes the visual evidence of blood out of carpet.  Under certain very specific circumstances, ex-cons may own firearms.  You can break free of most zip strips—but if you’re going to practice, wear wrist guards (it stings).  Everyone needs to register as a bone marrow donor because the bigger the pool, the better the odds—and that goes double for rare blood types and persons of non-European descent.  If you’re going to hot wire a car, make it old enough so you don’t have to mess with a steering lock.  Love scenes take interesting turns when you’re listening to Chris Isaak and a little Depeche Mode.*

And the most difficult part of picking a lock is convincing the locksmith that you need it for a book, no seriously.**  But once you do, you’re golden, and not only will he help you with a few crucial details, but he’ll show you how to pop a double wafer lock with a hairpin and a paperclip and let you practice with a tension wrench and ball pick because you keep snapping the  &$%# hairpin in half.

It’s probably a good thing that I’m not particularly talented in some of these areas***—Writer of All Trades, Mistress of None?—but I don’t have to be.  I just have to find the people who are and listen to ‘em.

Anyone have any cool stuff they’d like to share?

___

*Adolescent of the ’80s.  Sue me.

**It helps if you’re the library lady who helped his kid research a History Day project that made it to the regionals.  Just saying.

***I am a donor, though—blood, marrow, organs.   Don’t have to have talent for that.  Go forth and register, please.

Your fancy booklearnin’ don’t scare me none

I used to collect books about writing.  How to write, what to write, when to write, how to seduce the muse and beat the system.  A fair amount of them supposedly contained the Secret, Key, and One True Way to fame, fortune, and a literary life.

I bought a lot of these from the remainder and discount tables at the local bookstores.  This doesn’t reflect their quality—necessarily—so much as the vast quantity of advice arriving every other day to shove the older items off the shelf.  Regardless of price, some contained solid advice.

Some, in retrospect . . . didn’t.

Over the years and through many moves—and my discovery that writing professionals often blog—I’ve weeded my core collection down to four that were written by authors who don’t believe  that Getting Published was the sole goal of telling a story and that effort, care, and a fair amount of reading and research, were crucial.

Other books come and go, and even stick around,* but I would not gladly part with these:

On Writing by Stephen King.  Say what you want about his chosen genre—I say, more, please—but the man writes stories that non-readers read, and this book explains at least part of how he does it.  The chapter about the writer’s toolbox alone is worth the price of this book—but the rest of it is, in my opinion, is just as good.  Mr. King believes in good storytelling, the kind that sends shivers up your spine and tears down your cheeks—and he knows how to break it down into understandable components just as well as he writes it down into compulsively readable fiction.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.  Ms. Lamott is so open and honest about how difficult she sometimes finds this whole writing business that I can’t help but be reassured.  She is a well-known author who still struggles—in one chapter, she describes the time her agent (editor?) told her that the book she’d wanted to write wasn’t the one she’d actually written.  So, she took it home and spread the pages and sections on the floor and walked through it, literally, cutting and pasting, adding and subtracting, until it was as fixed as she could make it . . . that, to me, is one of the bravest acts of writing I can imagine.

Telling Lies for Fun and Profit by Lawrence Block.  Full disclosure—I hold Mr. Block at least partially responsible  for my lifelong love of characters with alternative moral compasses:  Bernie Rhodenbarr, Matthew Scudder, Keller—hit man, philatelist, philsopher—and Martin Ehrengraf, bless his twisty soul** . . . What’s an impressionable girl to do?  Some of the wry advice in Telling Lies might seem a little outdated—Mr. Block started out in the heyday of magazine fiction—but his principles of storytelling remain sound, and the stories about storytelling make for great reading.  If you have the opportunity to hear him speak—the man tours like whoa and visits a lot of libraries—go.  You won’t regret it.

Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner.  I bought this book when it was first released and read it and consulted it until it fell apart. A second edition is out now, updated for the electronic world, but it still explores the expectations, assumptions, and methods of everyone involved in this writing, agenting, and publishing business.   Forest made me think about how I operate as a writer and why, and how to work with that.  In my opinion—-and believe me, I’m not just  saying this because my current copy is autographed and I spend a lot of time over at Ms. Lerner’s blog-based community—this is one of the best writing books out there.

Arguments?  Agreements? Suggestions?

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Wondermark Comic from the relentlessly talented David Malki !

*Someone recommended Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own (MacDougal Street Baby?) and after checking it out of the library I bought it.  It’s a keeper, but it’s not precisely a how-to.

**Even Chip Harrison, though he’s not exactly bent, just randy.