"Figures often
beguile me.
Particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark
attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are
three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"
Mark Twain
{ Chapters
from My Autobiography, published in the North American Review in 1906}
And so I find myself, having just finished the fifth draft
of a new novel for middle grade readers, staring the stats WORD popped up.
Time was, I wrote long hand, then revised and typed a
story, only to ignore the numbers. WORD insisted on telling me the word count,
but I looked the other way. I was writing literature, not counting beans.
I remember the feeling of diminishment when I encountered
writers who spoke about word counts for different age groups, chapter page counts, and output counts per writing day. Everyone, it seemed, was counting.
I honestly couldn’t figure out why, and determined not to
write-by-numbers.
Only they are everywhere. And while they say nothing about
the quality of the story or the art of the telling, turns out they do count.
In the business of
publishing, they count quite a bit. To quote Agent Jennifer
Laughran’s iconic post on the subject, outlier word-counts put her in the
mode of “...I
am tying a noose.” I don’t want that responsibility. I also want my work to be considered
for publication.
Innovative work should not count these counts. But the numbers will let us know how far off the expected norms we’ve ventured,
and then choose to do so knowingly and deliberately.
These Stats still lie in the most fundamental sense of not telling
that all’s well, or that I must take some drastic action. The readability
statistics only sit there, telling their truth. It’s not an important truth. But
it is one I now look at , just as I look at the WORD program’s mechanical (and
often wrong) grammar-check at which end these stats pop up.
For me it is about marching forward having looked at all I
could know about what I wrote. It means that if a reader calls the story “too
long,” this is not a matter of length but the feeling it drags. The
strengths and faults lie in the art, not in the craft. The mechanical checks
and algorithmic statistics deserve a glance, and then the option to dismiss or
heed from a place of awareness.
Phew, these latest revision stats look okay. But who's counting?
