On Word Count and Other Matters

Greetings all.

Thanks so much for all the great comments regarding “Debbie Downer and the Dreaded Don’ts” What fun it was to read your comments and I must say I did enjoy flipping the established pedantry the collective bird.  We are such rebels, aren’t we?  Take that Elmore!!! And that!!!  We are artists!  We shall not be conservative with exclamation marks!!  Hyah!!!!

Some of you may remember my blog entitled “Force-Feeding the Classics”.  Many had fond memories of “Where the Red Fern Grows” in particular.  Well, I force-fed it to my eleven year old and was surprised by how much eye-rolling and groaning accompanied the enforced reading.  It began with making fun of the rather stodgy picture of Wilson Rawls on the back.  (He did look like a bit like a rat-pack gangster.) Then she had the audacity to guffaw at the names “Old Dan” and “Little Ann.”  Eventually she ended up siding with the raccoons!  ("Who’d want to spend two years working to buy dogs just so you could go out and kill raccoons?!  They’re adorable!!")

 

I finally told her she didn’t have to finish the damn thing but she wanted to find out why everyone always makes such a fuss about the ending and “those dogs better not die after all the time and energy I am putting into reading this book!”  I let her off the hook and that one went back to the library unfinished.  Experiment over.  Back to fairy-land for her.  (Note to readers:  I didn’t re-read it either.)

Lastly a poll:  Do you feel the need to be brief when you write?  I’ve noticed as I’m hitting the 50,000 word-mark in my WIP there’s this nagging feeling that I am taking too long to tell my story.  Now this may stem from a life-time of talking too much, and being told I need to stop talking so much, or it could just be the desire to expedite the story and get to the end already--fer cryin’ out loud! 

The guy in the turtleneck over at Writer’s Digest tells me I’m already past the acceptable word-count mark for MG fiction and explains it is because I don’t know how to edit.  However, Turtleneck assures me that YA word count is “very flexible” but to still shoot for 55,000 to 70,000 words.  Any more than that and I’m “playing with fire”.   

A very nice editor named Jessica over at Bookends made me feel a trifle better with her realistic post on Word Count.  She went for an overall of 80,000. I can live with that—I think.

Well, what’s your feel on this topic Peeps?  Do you pay word counts no-never-mind?  Do you aim for a required number or do you bunch of rabble-rousers fly your own kite in the face of such creative communism?  Weigh in below.  What are you and yours tipping the scales at?  (Yes, I know I ended a sentence with a preposition and somewhere Elmore Leonard is developing a sick headache!!!)

~Just Jill (!!)

 

 

On Force-Feeding the Classics or "Eat Your Classics! They're Good For You!"

With all the blog-talk about “the Classics” in literature, (see Terri Giuliamo Long’s thoughtful words or The Pen and Muse's musings) I thought to finally jump on the proverbial band-wagon and contribute my two cents, (though I missed all the fun blog-hopping and contests which, regrettably, I always seem to do).

My daughter is eleven and an avid reader.  While she was younger, and at the mercy of listening to whatever Mommy picked out to read, she was fed a steady diet of my own favorites from a childhood steeped in reading:  “Island of the Blue Dolphins” and Charlotte and her web.  All the “Little House” books, ad nauseum, “The Secret Garden” and “The Little Princess”.  You get my drift.

Then, the fairies struck.  Perhaps it was the onslaught of Tink and her irrepressible pals (No disrespect to Gail Carson Levine  and her fabulous “Fairie-Dust and the quest for the Egg”) or it is quite possible the endless stream of “Rainbow Fairies” books (which were her first solo read) drilled FAIRIES! in to her consciousness like some type of crazy thought-reform cult.  Regardless, she had caught a whiff of fantasy books and has since to waver from her chosen genre, despite all my offerings.  She will occasionally read one of my "classic" choices, but usually as a home-school history read, not “for fun”.  Really?

  I remember reading “Where the Red Fern Grows” in Mr. Kaiser’s sixth grade English class in 1977.  (Yes, I'm old.) Being a fast reader, I reached the end of the book while everyone else was still off chasing 'coons.  I remember actually sobbing at my desk, my head bent low over the book, trying in vain to hold back the flood of emotions that tore through me as I read the ending. (I won’t give it away here since my daughter usually reads my blog and I still have hope she will read this book.)
It changed my relationship with books--forever.  Nothing had ever before moved me in such a way.

There weren’t so many choices for reading when I was eleven.  We were what one might call an “undiscovered tween market” or , if there had been the overwhelming choices for fantasy, I might have swung my daughter’s way with my reading choices too.  My "fantasy" reads were “ghost stories” like "The Amityville Horror" and V.C. Andrews books, and I read them almost guiltily.  I knew most were trash, and I usually leaned more towards books with the shiny Newbury gilded to its front cover.

But now, I wonder.  Will enforcing these "classics" just make my daughter dislike them?  Will it be like making her eat French onion soup with quite possibly the same results?  After reading the definitions for “a classic” I wonder if it is even relevant any more, hence the quotation marks.  We are all such creatures of our own creations.  Pinterest, Facebook, playlists, blogsites…we have all become specialists of our own interests, and (I think) people are too busy compiling their own canons, and declaring them sound, to bother playing catch-up. 

I really am on the ol’ fence-post on this one.  What do you think Readers?  Writers?  Do we enforce the old standards on the impressionable young minds of the world, or do we let them revel in dystopian zombie fantasy or whatever the hell else they like to read simply because…they are reading.

 Is that enough?  Shouldn’t it be enough?

Discuss.