Do you ever sit down to write something and think, ‘yeah, I can knock this out in five thousand words or so,’ but then you look down a week later and there’s ten thousand words on the page already and you’re not even close to finishing? Yeah, happens to me way too often. As in, right now. This story I started writing last week is way bigger than I thought it would be and unfortunately it’s only growing larger the longer I think about it. Thing is, I really like the story! So I think I’m going to spend another week on it. I may just be procrastinating on Oneiromancer but I’d like to see this one through to the end too. Hopefully one more week will finish it off.
Beyond that though, I’m not sure how to avoid the issue of story bloat. It happens too often, and the only times I’m able to avoid the problem are when I have a hard word limit that I have to follow for a competition. I guess I could just impose one on myself, but guessing how long the story I want will be, and crushing what I really want down into a certain number of words are different tasks entirely.
I think one solution to getting stories of a certain length could be to set a word limit before I even begin thinking about the story at all. That way I can devise the type of story that actually fits in the allotted word count rather than trying to squeeze something bigger down. It feels very limiting though. I’ll have to think about the pros and cons a little longer on this one.
Thank you for reading,
Benjamin Hawley
Dangerous Day Job 