I just hit 100,000 words in my fantasy novel draft and it feels like a trap

I've been working on this thing for almost two years, and when the word counter ticked over that big number, I didn't feel proud, I felt sick. It's a messy, sprawling first draft set in a city I called 'The Spire', and now I'm staring at a mountain of pages that probably needs to be cut in half. Anyone else hit a big word count milestone and realize your story is a bloated mess? How do you even start fixing that?

2 comments

2 Comments

shah.barbara7h ago

Used to think big word counts were good but this changed my mind.

lee85h ago

Oh good, I'm glad we've moved past the phase where writing felt like a word count treadmill. Nothing says quality like padding a sentence until it's completely unreadable. I used to think hitting that high number meant I was really saying something, turns out I was just saying a lot of nothing. It's a relief to just write what you mean and then stop.