(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

[noctuary]

I track wordcounts if I have a particular number goal I have to reach. Otherwise it's more or less just an interest factor. Generally novels are between 70 and 100k, and I imagine whether or not a publisher picks it up will have something to do with length, but it's not going to be the only thing they consider. The story is more important than the length, so it's not something to aim for so much as something to keep in mind as you go, when considering how much of the story is yet to come and so forth.