A quick question for writers

[msagara]

I mentioned earlier that I have been using the equivalent of MS Word's wordcount while writing, and that this has not perhaps been very smart. I know that we're all looking at the lengths of our various books, and I was wondering: How do you keep track of wordcount while writing? Because I had an extra 45K words and an extra 25K words when looking at the page runoffs on the two books I did write in Scrivener, and this was ... unfortunate. And I would like not to repeat it if I can*.

If you need to turn in a 100k manuscript--or a manuscript of a specific maximum length--do you check the runoff count as part of your daily writing, do you format it in manuscript format so you write -to- a runoff count?

ETA: * I am aware that there might be a bit of gentle mockery at this point

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

No mocking. But this is why I'm really leery of whiz bang writing programs and stick to Word.

I write in SMF, courier 12pt, double spaced lines, etc. in MSWord. As I told Ms. E down there, my agent told me to stop doing word count that way, she only wants to hear about MSWord count. The word count I post in progress reports is MSWord, but that's just so I know I'm making progress.

So doing it this way, I keep track of page counts and MSWord count at the same time. When I finished writing last night I had exactly 80 pages. MSWord tells me that is 17,304 words. If I do the 250 words per page SMF count, that says 20k. That is a big difference.

Mostly I shoot for page count. Somewhere between 400-450 pages is in the ballpark. Then I stick MSWord count on there for the agent. It makes her happy.

[pjthompson]

Word. (As in, what you said.)