Word-Count

When I wrote Six O’clock, I wrote the whole book down in spiral notebooks that I later transferred to the computer.  After I typed the whole thing up I was shocked to see how low my word count was. About 52,000. I knew to make it a real novel I had to pump it up to at least 80,000 words. There was no way to check my word count when I wrote everything down long-hand, (and I wasn’t going to count each word either) so I didn’t stress too much about it and figured when I did my re-writes I would add the necessary words to make my novel complete.

Now that I’m writing my next novel I’m constantly checking my word count. Before I close out each day I want to make sure that I hit my 1,000 word goal. Most days I hit it, going above that number. Which is good for the days when I don’t.

I don’t know if this is stunting the growth of this novel by constantly checking the word count or is it helping me by keeping me on track? So my question is, how often do you check your word count when you’re writing?