Why do I write so much? Why do I write so much that I can never finish something in a decent amount of time? I need one of those little word count icons the writers on my flist have so you guys can cheer me on when the word count Goes Down!
*sobs*
Urk
Published by Nancy E. Shaffer
NANCY E. SHAFFER has been an experimental psychologist (M.A., Cognitive Psychology, Rice University), a philosopher (Ph.D., History and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Davis), and software developer. She taught history and philosophy of science at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her philosophical work has appeared in the journal Philosophy of Science and her pop-culture philosophy website, All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. Dis/inhbition is her first novel. She currently resides in Tempe, Arizona. View all posts by Nancy E. Shaffer
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 
**borrows Rob’s pompoms**
Word count, word count,
Increase the word count,
goooooooooooooo, Masq!
:0
Ummm….(passes wine)
Not sure if that will help, but it can’t hurt, right?
No! No! No!
I need to DECREASE the word count!!!!
*ah!!!*
Yes, but looking at it, I realize it won’t help. It’s built with the assumption that you have a goal of so many words that you haven’t reached yet. My problem’s more like weight loss. I need to LOSE words.
Chocolate wouldn’t be a bad idea at this juncture, either.
; )
(passes chocolate)
Hee! I totally misunderstood! ;(
Decrease the count, decrease the count,
we enourage you to decrease the count!
But only if you increase the production of stories. How ya gonna do that?
More stories of less words each. Each takes less long to write, new stories come out more often.
You seeing the point here now??
; )
(passes out)
Aha! Now I get it..
Word had a word counter function.
But right now as I’m editing, realizing I need to add stuff for clarification, and watching the word count increase exponentially and knowing I’m still not done, the word counter is only depressing me. I wanted to finish this story today.
And I can’t start bringing the word count down until I finish fleshing the entire thing out, and figure out what’s necessary and what’s not. I can’t get to smaller except through larger.
Well, that’s my point–I have to WAIT to cut it down when I’m done. Which means the story I wanted to finish today won’t get finished until….next week?
And wait a minute. You’re the one always counting your words, all happy if you wrote 200 more words today than yesterday. What’s with the saying you’re an over-writer now?
I’m a LOT A LOT A LOT an expansive writer. Never use 200 words when 1000 will do.
But it feels SO DAMNED GOOD when you manage to cut the words back down and it READS BETTER that way.
I can’t help you. Look at my drabbles. Ever wonder why I can’t write just one like everyone else? ARgh.
Well, that’s another problem on top of it. Not only are my individual episodes too long, but they’re all episodes of the same story. I can never stop writing about the same character and world until I’ve exhausted all the possible stories.
We don’t mind your words Masq. We enjoy them very much.
::GreedyAnn runs and hides for enabling Masq’s words::
same here again. Look at the 100 odd stories I have in this universe then look at how many of them are permutations on Angel/Connor.
If you’re greedy, then you want to READ my words.
But you can’t read them if I’m still writing them.
If it takes me months to finish.
Can you?
Shrinking it back down makes it all take longer, yes, indeedy.
I like to think, “But it would be faster if I just hadn’t written so much in the first place!”
But my writing doesn’t work that way. I have to write bazillions of words, then it’s survival of the fittest.
Well, it all comes back to Angel and Connor, man. All of it.
at least for the two of us (though I do deviate to sneak in my Spike/Dru)
*whistles mysteriously*
ha!
Alright then.
No, but I for one am patient.
Cut, slash (both meanings or not hee), and burn. You can do this.
This posts reminds me of being an undergrad when everything I wrote had to be short and I wasn’t very good at it. I’m still not very good at it, ut I get to write more words these days.
Oh yeah, get assigned a ten page paper, end up writing twenty. Or thirty.
And NO ONE sympathizes with you, because their ten-page paper is eight pages. Or six. They just don’t get it. Writing too much means you can’t focus, you can’t prioritize, you can’t judge relevancy.
It’s not a *good* thing.