(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

[auguris]

I read a variety of genres and nonfiction -- as long as I don't read something similar and then jump right into writing, it doesn't effect me. Although if I've been obsessing over a series or genre, I have to cleanse my mental pallet before I work on anything -- usually playing Civ IV does it for me, or reading the news.

I personally use word counts to assess how I'm doing. "Hey, I managed 2K today? Good job self!" Or, "yikes, I've done 50 words in an hour, today obviously isn't going to happen." I don't judge a work by how long it is, though. It's nice to have a word count for work posted online, but only as a way to assess how long it might take me to get through -- for me it's the same as using the thickness of a physical book to judge how long it will take me to read it.