Check-In – Day 25

[samuraiter]

You are going to be seeing the posts go up early this week, thanks to a change to my schedule. Apologies. ... What have you been doing?

— Thinking. Maybe a little, maybe a lot.
— Writing.
— Planning and / or researching.
— Editing.
— Sending things to the beta.
— Posting!
— Relaxing, taking a break, etc.
— Other stuff-ing. Look at the comment.

Question: What is your preferred word count range to write for a story?

Comments

[brithistorian]

I've been writing about every other day on average. Yesterday I came the closest I've ever come to 2000 words: 1954.

I don't know if I'd say it's "preferred" but my goal word count range is the neighborhood of 100K words. I haven't reached it yet, but that's what I'm aiming for. I'm sort of like a runner who's training for a marathon: First you build up your mileage to the point where you can do it at all, then you try to improve your speed. Once I can actually produce 100K words, then I'll start working on producing 100K well plotted words. (Right know I can produce 40K-50K well plotted words, and everything beyond that is slice of life and/or a second story just glued on to the end of the first one.)

[threedices]

I outlined a bit, trying to work out the kinks in my plot.

Write a few words, too. It's slow going.

[linaewen]

I'm currently relaxing, trying to get up the motivation to write.

I usually aim to have a one-shot story or a WIP chapter be at least 1500 to 2000 words.

[voodoosgirl]

I plotted and outlined today. Read over what I've written for the next chapter and tried to write. It's hard at the end of a 10 hour work day. Too tired to be creative or focus.

My word count for a chapter is anywhere from 4K to 5K plus. The bulk of my words (over 300,000) are tied up in two stories. My first one is over 170,000. My second long story is at 91,000 and counting. The shorter stories are anything from 1200 words to 15,000. I'm practicing drabbles to teach myself to be more succinct in my storytelling! LOL.

[doranwen]

Well, tonight I've gotten several hundred more words written on the exchange assignment I'm working on, but I keep getting distracted by stuff. *sg*

I find stories between 1k and 2k the easiest to write - but I've written one as long as 25k (I'm still marveling at the others commenting here who've written fics at least twice that - how do you DO that????), and the one I was writing tonight is looking to end up at least 2k. The Rookie Blue WIP I've been working on is probably going to end up around 50k (only a very rough estimate as I've never written anything that long - but I have chapter titles mapped out to write for and each chapter seems to be around 2k, so…). One of the Rookie Blue WIPs I started is 11k and there's still so much of the outline left that it could end up over 100k easy. If I manage to get the current RB WIP done I'll try to finish that one next.

I don't have a preferred range, though - it's whatever the story needs. I write a lot of exchange fics, that's why I like 1-2k, because most exchanges seem to have a 1k minimum. I find short fairly easy to write - it's harder for me to plot something long enough to fill up a longer fic.