(no subject)

[intothewood]

I'm wondering....

Do you all read within your genre?
I won't do it because I don't want to be influenced in any way, but I will watch films within my genre, and I listen to a lot of music for inspiration.

I believe duskpeterson mentioned tracking word counts - do you do this?
I can't do word counts, because it would drive me mad. People ask me how many words I've written on a specific piece - I don't know, and I don't want to know. I guess it makes me feel like I'm assigning worth to what I've written by a quantity, and I don't want to do that. When I reach the end I'll look to see what I have purely as a gage within common classifications in the book industry, but I hate doing even that much.

I think of books like Notes From Underground or Death in Venice that have relatively small word counts and would be classified as novellas, but what does that mean? That they're less valuable in some way? As profit margins, yes. As stories, they're massive. It bothers me.

Comments

[cleio]

I do read a good bit in the genre I write in. Mostly simply because I enjoy that type of story, although I will also look at them critically and try to figure out what works, what doesn't, and why.

As far as word counts go, I do keep a close eye on it, but that is a habit I have from my academic writing, where word count is everything. When writing fiction, it doesn't really bother me. I reach the end when I reach the end, to echo your own words.

I think sometimes, especially in genres such as fantasy, an author seems to want to force a high word count, meaning that the story would have been better if loads of unnecessary detail or description would have simply been left out. It can interrupt the flow of the story, taking away from strength of the plot.