How many words go into the words?

I’ve talked before on this blog about the last major rewrite (or LMR as I keep calling it), but in my ongoing effort to show you how the sausage is made, that was only the last rewrite Falling had.

Since the first draft that began so long ago, I completely rewrote it on at least 10 other occasions. In my records they’re in folders called things like 20090821_pre_self_publishing, Final before last spellcheck April 2016, Manuscript 20080109 pre-Pulp Fiction changes (referring to a publisher who was interested but no longer exists) and MANUSCRIPT APR 06 BEFORE LOUEZE’S CHANGES (done before incorporating changes from a friend who offered to read it).

And do you know how many words that all adds up to? No seriously, do you, and can you tell me? I don’t have anything like the time apart from a quick and dirty back of the envelope calculation.

Falling is a novel in eight major parts, and in latter rewrites most parts became so long they had to be split into two documents. That means each major draft is made up of between 10 and 14 documents. So to calculate the total word count exactly, we’re talking about nearly 170 documents to open up and do word counts on.

Instead, I counted the total number of words in each document in the story in two different drafts, then took an average of the two totals. Then I multiplied that number by the number of rewrites there have been, everything from the initial draft to the copy you can hold in your very hands today.

And the total? Not including all the notes, research, chronologies, text-based storyboards, essays on the themes, notes on characters, scenes, narrative problems, ideas about ghosts, monsters and phenomena, etc – which I’ll similarly count up one day for the sake of curiosity?

2,840,428 (point 5, for some reason).

That’s almost three million words written to create a single novel. Admittedly Falling is very long and very complicated, but considering I started it when I was 20 years old and have written so many words to get it right, it’s no wonder I’ve considered it my life’s work.