I dreamt about word counts last night. I'm on the home stretch toward meeting the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. So I've been clocking in a few hundred words before going to bed many nights. And yesterday I spent a few hours before that at a write-in with other NaNo folks. No wonder the dreams about word counts then, eh?
Reminds me of a statistic I learned during sessions with our pastor in preparing for marriage. It went something like this: men have an average of 500 words they will use during a given day; women have a 27,000-word quota. Therefore, what often happens is this: the husband arrives home at the end of his work day and all of his words have been spent. But the wife, particularly if she is a stay-at-home-mommy to a little one still has approximately 26,975 words left and only a few hours in which to use them. She will start firing them off rapidly as soon as her honey walks in the door and can continue on unabated for the remainder of the evening, if allowed. She has no fear of running out of words, she fears running out of time.
In this word-count driven month I'm living, I drift back to those statistics often. And I wonder - do writers have these kind of limitations? If I press to write more than 4,500 words in one day, will I run out? Or do I have a global word count limit that I am rapidly approaching and which is set to be reached right at about three quarters of the way through the final chapter of my novel? Will my written word-count limit be replenished daily the way verbal limits seem to be?
Not a lot of deep thought here tonight. Just my way of saying, I'm still here. I'm still writing. It's just that this pesky novel is eating up a good amount of my word quota and not leaving much for y'all. I've stolen these few to have something to share today.
What are your thoughts on word limits? Do you have children that seem to have widely varying needs in terms of daily word expenditure? Do you and your husband match the statistics or is one (or both) of you an anomoly? Feel free to share your thoughts. As far as I know there are no limits to word intake, especially when it comes to listening.
Monday, November 24, 2008
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1 musings:
I was wondering if the more words you write, the more easily the words come to you? Or is there a "wall" at the end like when you are running a marathaon? I bet you are going to miss your daily time spent with those characters once the month is over. Can't wait to hear all about them when you are done!
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