Counting words

My com­put­er pro­gram counts words. It’s use­ful in a num­ber of ways. My nov­el con­tracts usu­al­ly ref­er­ence the kind of a book I am meant to write by word total. More or less, that’s my goal. A big nov­el might be 60,000 words or more. Novel­la, 20,000. Short sto­ry, 5,000. Rough figures.

But I use that word counter in oth­er ways. When I am edit­ing my own work, and I set out to tight­en the text, I watch the word count. If the word count goes up, it’s a hint I’m padding the text, adding bloat. Num­ber up. Bad. Num­ber down. Good.

There are times I will tell myself I need to cut a thou­sand words. Why might I do this? An intu­itive sense that I can and should, know­ing that cut­ting is almost always a good thing to do. Buck­mas­ter Fuller’s “Less is more,” should be attached to all com­put­er screens. So I work though the text, cut­ting a word here, slic­ing a sen­tence there, adju­di­cat­ing adjec­tives, and all the while my word counter will tell me how I’m doing until I reach my goal.

In sum, add word coun­ters to sub­tract wast­ed words.