No, nonsense, ridiculous. This is the 21st century. We have robots to do that for us—or in my case, Microsoft Word 2007. Ah, here it is, on the Review tab: "Word Count." Beauty. I simply type in my first line—
It was a wet and cold day.Click "Word Count," and Voila! Seven words. At ten-cents a word, I just made seventy cents. Cool! Next line—
"Contrarily, it's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!" exclaimed Mary Poppins enthusiastically.Hmm. According to Ms Word, that line is also worth only a mere seventy cents, even though it required far more work to write. (I had to go look up the correct spelling of "supercali"-whatever.) Obviously, I have a financial incentive here to write entire stories in baby-talk.
Or wait a minute: oh, wow, stroke of genius! I'll make my main character stutter! That will immediately double the value of his every line of dialog! Excuse me while I g- g- go write myself a L- L- L-, L- Lexus!
It doesn't work that way, of course. Well, yes, perhaps there are financial incentives to write entire novels in baby-talk, but word count isn't one of them. Rather, as with so many other aspects of the writing trade, to understand word count, you must think back to the technology of a century ago.
What is word count? It's a measure of how long the story is. Why does this matter? Because it determines how much space the story will take up in print. Why does space matter? Because it determines how many pages it will occupy, which determines how the presses and bindery need to be set-up for this issue, which determines how much paper you need to buy, which determines how much it will cost to mail the completed magazine, and so on, and so on. And remember, you can't just arbitrarily add two pages to an issue if you get a really great but slightly long story, because in the world of web presses, the finished page count always has to be an even multiple of 8.
This is why the old-line publishers always kept a library of stock illustrations and dingbats on-hand and bought lots of tiny "filler" pieces. In an ideal world, you sold all empty space to advertisers. In the real world, you spackled over the holes with whatever was handy.
As I said, old tech. This isn't really an issue today, when modern page layout software enables you to compress a longish story by shrinking the font to 10.5 points instead of your customary 11 or pad a shortish story by adding an extra .2-point of leading between the lines, but traditions die hard. So how do you form a reasonable estimate of how much space your story will take up in print?
"Reasonable estimate" is the key. In print, it's not the literal number of words that matter but the occupied horizontal, and more importantly, vertical space. An 'm' takes up more space than an 'n', a dash (—) more space than a hyphen (-), and a laconic single-word line of dialog as much vertical space as a full line of hysterical babbling. How can you as a writer make any sense of it?
Enter the concept of the print word.
It's simple, really, but again, it's a relic of old tech. The convention is that in English, in print, a "word" is six-characters long—and that means every character, including punctuation and blank spaces. So on an old 10-pitch ("pica") typewriter, all you had to do was set your margins at 10 and 73, always hit Return when the end-of-line bell dinged and rarely hyphenate words at the ends of lines, and Voila! Your average line length was 10 print words. Double-space your copy, leaving one-inch margins below the "slug" line at the top of the page and the bottom of the page, and you ended up with 25 lines per page of copy. Ten words per line times 25 lines per page; your average page was 250 print words. Four manuscript pages equal 1,000 words: a 3,000-word short story is 12 pages in manuscript and a 100,000-word novel is 400 pages. (All these numbers are approximate, of course. When writing short stories, always round to the nearest hundred. When writing a novel, always round to the nearest thousand. And don't sweat precision too much, as no matter what you think the word count is, the publisher will tell you what the word count was after it's too late for you to change your mind.)
Similarly, if you write in standard news or dramatic script format in 10-pitch Courier font, one manuscript page also turns out to be, on average, one minute of air or running time. (David Gerrold tells a wonderful story in one of his books about writing a Star Trek script on a borrowed typewriter, only to realize after it was done that he'd been using a 12-pitch ("elite") machine and had to cut his script by 1/6th at the last possible moment.)
"Fine," you say. "You're a relic. No doubt your house is full of typewriters." (As a matter of fact, it is, but that's another story.) "So how do we who live in the modern world estimate word count?"
My preferred technique is to set up my word processing program to emulate as closely as possible the appearance of an old-style typescript page: one-inch margins, Courier 10-point font, monospaced if the program will let me, and double-spaced lines with widow and orphan control shut off, so that nothing is automatically moved from one page to the next or previous, and then to take my best guess based on the finished manuscript page count. If that sounds like too much work for you or your word processing program won't let you do that, you can always go back to Ms Word's "Word Count" option.
Ignore the literal word count, though, and take the "Characters (with spaces)" value and divide by six. For example, in our original two sentences:
It was a wet and cold day.That one is 26 characters long, including punctuation and spaces, which rounds down to 4 print words long, or forty cents at a dime a word. On the other hand the loquacious Ms Poppins—
"Contrarily, it's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!" exclaimed Mary Poppins enthusiastically.Weighs in at a remarkable 95 characters, or 16 print words—or more importantly, at a buck-sixty, which seems like a much better number!
There is a flaw in this technique. It doesn't account for the fact that in print, every new line is considered 10 print words, no matter how short the actual line may be. But at least it's a better approximation than Ms Word's literal "Word Count" number.
Any questions or comments?
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