Sunday, June 28, 2009

3000 word story ballooned to 7k when the limit is 5k

So I was putting together various pieces that I'd written for this story "Moving Day", and it added up to 7500 words or so, which was kind of a shock. The wordcount limit for it is 5000 words, for the Armadillocon workshop.

I hadn't realized I'd collected that much material. I'd decided to write a decent conclusion for the thing, in a new file, and the conclusion was as long as the rest of the story. The story was only about 3500 words on Friday. Okay, I guess if I wrote 3000 words yesterday and 500 words this morning, then that adds up, doesn't it?

But it was kind of a false alarm: there was a lot of cruft in the draft when I put all the pieces together, including two versions of one scene, so when I threw out a bunch of notes and duplications and some pieces that were no longer relevant, I was down to 5500 words pretty fast. I think I can deal with that in the next draft without much trouble.

Still kind of funny, though. The whole reason I switched to this project, over the other one I was working on, was I was sure this one could be done in about 3000 words.

1 comment:

  1. I like this word, "cruft." I'm not a programmer, so thanks for providing me a new metaphor for describing the junk that makes its way into a story and needs to be pruned, weeded, edited (etc.) out.

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