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Showing posts from April, 2016

Don't Judge a Book By It's Word Count

There's a topic that's been on my chest for awhile now that I felt like I should finally talk about. That is the subject of word count. In school I had a class where we were required to write a complete novel at 50,000 words. The idea was that if we had a completed novel under our belts we could either revise and add more to it later or learn from the process for future work. As it turned out, I really enjoyed writing mine and decided I wasn't finished with it. Based on what everyone was saying, I knew that I had a lot of work to do to get it "ready." I still remember a talk I had with a colleague awhile back who shall also remain nameless. I told him I had written a book and he asked how many pages it was. 255, I replied. 55,000 words. He shrugged, unimpressed. "Oh, so a short story." Mind you, he was not a writer. In that moment, I felt a strong urge to question him on his literary merits. But I remained calm. I simply assumed that I had to