Last week's
post about word count seems to have attracted more interest than most. The
original Linked In discussion was also noticeably more involving than a lot of
them. This set me to wondering why so many writers are quite so obsessive about
word count.
I was
listening to a programme on Radio Four last week (for US readers, Radio Four is
the main UK talk radio channel) and it was discussing the difficulty of
defining "work". It turns out that most people like to be thought of
as doing quite a lot of "work" but nobody is quite sure what to
include in it. My personal bete noire is
when businessmen say that they work 16 hour day in which they include lunch and
dinner because they're talking to colleagues, so this is obviously
"work", isn't it? When I was working as a freelancer, there was
always the question as to whether journey time counted as "work" or
not. Given that I might be expected to travel from London to Manchester as part
of the job, this was hardly a trivial issue. For writers, the whole question of
what is "work" is even more difficult to pin down. Donna Tartt has
apparently said in an interview that she "works" all the time, partly
on the grounds that she carries a notebook with her and constantly jots down
things that she might put into a novel. Given that she has written three novels
in 21 years, her definition of "work" does, I think, stretch it about
as far as you can. And in that last, ever so slightly bitchy, comment, we come
to the nub of the concern about word count. For when I say that three books in
21 years hardly seems like full-time employment, what I am saying is,
ultimately, that she doesn't write a lot each day.
Now I spent
my last post ridiculing the idea that your creative effort can be measured in
words per day, but here I am, doing just that. Why? Because, like all writers I
want to be taken seriously as a writer and, until I win the Booker, how do I
define the "work" of writing?
I could, of
course, just say that a writer is anybody who writes. But, every so often, someone
comes up with the idea that almost literally everybody in the country has, at
some stage, started to write a book. I can quite believe it. I have even seen
computer programs being sold that claim to enable you to turn your brilliant
idea into prose even if you do not really have a plot, any characters or the
first clue of how to write. On this definition, we are all, it appears, writers
now.
I have a
friend with an English degree who decided that she would like to write. She
joined a Writers Circle, because people in a Writers Circle will be writers,
yes? After weeks of listening to a group of not noticeably talented people
reading their Special Words to each other, she gave up. The worst thing, she
suggested, was the unspoken social contract whereby you agreed that the other
person's Special Words were evidence of real talent in exchange for them doing
the same for you. It's quite possible that some of the people in the group had
real potential, but in the atmosphere of mutual onanism, nobody was ever going
to find out. It does seem fair to say, though, that
membership of a Circle does not make you a writer.
Once upon a
time, the test of whether or not you were a writer was whether or not you had a
book published. But that's hardly a test any more. Many really rather good
writers are self-published or published by independent publishers that no one
has ever heard of. Unfortunately, so are some people whose work, by any
standard other than their own, would struggle to be judged as a "proper
book". Some people have tried to replace the test of "had a book
published" with "had a book published by a mainstream
publisher". But, looking at the books published by mainstream publishers,
I don't see that as being any test of quality either. Even after you've taken out
the celebrity books (often written by someone whose name is not on the cover)
you are left with some works of dubious worth. I'll name no names because it's
a grey area, but we can all think of some very doubtful stuff that is getting
mainstream publication these days.
So if the
test isn't "I've had a book published", what defines somebody as a
"real" writer? It would be nice to suggest that
it is whether or not you make a living out of writing. Unfortunately (he said
with feeling), the last time I looked, which was, admittedly a few years ago,
the average amount made by somebody who actually writes for money was £7000 a
year. Obviously Dan Brown and JK Rowling manage rather more than that, but for
most writers, the idea of it paying a living wage is just ridiculous. At one
level, this is quite a good definition of a writer, but it suffers from the
opposite problem of defining it as "somebody who writes". While
almost everybody is in the first category, practically nobody is in the latter.
I think it is the absence of any useful definition that makes us
so obsessive about word counts. It's almost as if, in the community of
"serious writers who haven't had a bestseller yet", we define a
writer as "somebody who writes down about 1000 words a day". It's a
measure of our insecurity. And we are all so very insecure. It's a lonely life
and we look for all the validation we can get. And in the absence of Amazon
reviews (hint, hint) and massive sales (even bigger hint), we look to our word
count for the validation we aren't getting anywhere else.
That's a thousand words.
I'm a proper writer, I am.
