My first draft hit 50,000 words and I'm kind of freaked out

I was just trying to get the story down, you know, no editing. I opened the doc today and the word count was 50,217. I never thought I'd write that much on a first pass, it feels like a real book now. The problem is, I know at least 15k of it is pure garbage, like side character rambles and weird scene repeats. Has anyone else hit a big word count milestone and then immediately felt overwhelmed by how much needs fixing?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix_carter3d agoMost Upvoted

Whoa, congrats... that's the good kind of panic. Honestly, the garbage parts are just raw material now, way easier to shape than a blank page.

taylor_hayes253d ago

Remember my buddy who wrote a whole fantasy novel draft in like three months. He hit 80k words and called me, voice totally shaky, saying he had three different versions of the same battle scene and a subplot about a goblin's bakery that went nowhere. He just kept writing "bakery" in his notes to cut later. Took him a year to clean it up, but that messy draft was the only way the good story underneath could come out.