How are you approaching the comp limit?

So, exactly 1000 words. How do you play it? Write long and edit like mad? Come up short and pad? Shoot for the mark on the first try?

Mine went as high as 1055 before I went to work on the editing. That was my plan all along. Write what the story requires, then figure out how to whittle it down. And it has worked, but the process is a bit frustrating. Tweak here. Oops, down to 993 words. Add a short sentence there. Oops, up to 1002 words. Pull a couple adjectives. Yay. Except two lines down there's a missing preposition. Put it in and we are back to 1001.🙁

Anyone else approach it differently?

Hi Ape Man, I have one waiting mods approval at the moment. I wasn’t going to enter this comp as I’ve always done so badly in the past. I don’t yet have what it takes to keep up with the proper writers on here. But after they published my Christmas ghost story I thought I would give it a cheeky go. I didn’t have a problem with the 1,000 words as I wrote it on the fly with any number of possible endings. The only thing was, on MS Word it came up at exactly 1,000 words, but once I submitted it on the edit page it came up two words short. I did leave a comment for the mods in the appropriate box saying that I could easily add another two words if needed. That was yesterday and it’s still awaiting approval so I don’t know if my MS Word is wrong or the text editor on SS. I guess I’ll find out if and when it is approved or not.

Quote by Brad_Naylor

Hi Ape Man, I have one waiting mods approval at the moment. I wasn’t going to enter this comp as I’ve always done so badly in the past. I don’t yet have what it takes to keep up with the proper writers on here. But after they published my Christmas ghost story I thought I would give it a cheeky go. I didn’t have a problem with the 1,000 words as I wrote it on the fly with any number of possible endings. The only thing was, on MS Word it came up at exactly 1,000 words, but once I submitted it on the edit page it came up two words short. I did leave a comment for the mods in the appropriate box saying that I could easily add another two words if needed. That was yesterday and it’s still awaiting approval so I don’t know if my MS Word is wrong or the text editor on SS. I guess I’ll find out if and when it is approved or not.

It's the SS editor. There's been some discussion in the comp thread. Mods know and take it into account.

Quote by Mendalla

It's the SS editor. There's been some discussion in the comp thread. Mods know and take it into account.

Well, my comp entry was accepted today as it was. I'm quite pleased about that. No edits needed. That's the first story I've written with an exact word count. Are these usual rules?

Quote by Brad_Naylor

Well, my comp entry was accepted today as it was. I'm quite pleased about that. No edits needed. That's the first story I've written with an exact word count. Are these usual rules?

There's often maximums and sometimes minimums but exact number is fairly rare in my experience. For instance, the 10th anniversary comps in the fall of 2020 had 3 comps, each with a different range of lengths.

I wrote with the word counter active in google docs and tried ti get around the 1000 mark. Then upped and downed as I edited. Was really interesting to have an exact target to aim for.

Quote by Ceebees
the word counter active in google docs

This me. I like Google Docs for straight up writing. Google's Workspace apps are my go to for personal use nowadays.

It is almost a game after a while, bang go those words, whoosh go those words to make it up.

It's a weird and interesting trick. I wrote extra-shaggy, and so hit 1400 but knew I could cut quite a bit. I just kept taking passes, cutting more words with each pass. Those last 200 were hard. I'm at 997 and am going to plump it back tomorrow. I'm counting words in MS Word, I hope the count doesn't change when I paste it in here.

Nearly all my stories for competitions are right on the word limit. I used to be hopeless and go way over in my early drafts and have to edit hard. But nowadays I'm getting more accurate from the get go; indeed with this story I naturally hit 1000 +/- five words all through the drafting and editing stages. Though I do find Grammarly suggests more hyphens than I instinctively use.

Both Word and Google docs have the same word count I've found. I tend to write in Goggle docs as I'm doing more on my phone nowadays (I'm sure those who know me will know why,) but generally I copy the story into Word and submit from that, as it holds the formatting better than submitting from Google docs.

The word count increased when I submitted my story here, by one word, not sure why. I thought I understood the mechanics as the last time on the other site, the word count went up by the number of words in the one-liner. Not this time.

Quote by verbal
I wrote extra-shaggy

What a great expression, I'm going to borrow that.

Got the length okay, original idea, okay BUT, as I've mentioned elsewhere I (accidentally) submitted my comp story without the relevant picture (water and pines). Is it possible that a kindly moderator person be allowed to add the photo to my efforts (and gain my eternal gratitude)