(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

[analect]

Ooh, interesting thing you raise about the novella tag. (And hello and welcome to cleio!) As far as I go, when I read, I read widely, and it doesn't necessarily bear much relation to what I write. F'rex, I write romance, but don't really read it, aside from keeping an occasional eye on market trends.

Word counts... yes. In writing for pleasure, I don't really bother too much, except in the sense of using them as rough gauges. Everything else, word count gives at least a broad-spectrum idea of where the beginning, middle and end fall, and balances things out. It doesn't need to be specific, and tbh I don't really like the idea that, say, a chapter *has* to be so many words and neither over nor under. Every story has a rhythm, and for me wordage is a tool in measuring and controlling that, but I tend not to obsess.