Watching the Word Budget

Long-form or short-form, a writer’s always watching the word budget.

At a writer’s seminar, master of short stories Mary Robinette Kowal raised the question: what’s your ‘word budget?’

Kowal’s framework for fiction she calls the MICE Quotient. MICE stands for

• Milieu (the world)
• Idea
• Character
• Event

These are all story element you need to create a satisfying story.

The word budget exists in all writing, whether you intentionally count words or not. Any time you target a story length, you set a word budget, with the aim of telling the whole story in a set number of words. That’s a word budget.

In short fiction, you might aim for 500 or 1000 words. A novella might be 20,000 to 50,000 words. A full length novel: 70,000-120,000 words.

Counting Backwards

Each story element – Milieu, Idea, Character and Event – requires some words to describe it. Kowal points out the more story elements you include, the more words you need to describe them all. The more elements you throw in, the faster you use up your word budget.

Simple stories might describe the milieu (world) or scenic location, a character, an idea or a single event. You can do a lot with a small number of words when there’s only one of each story element. Add more locations, characters, ideas and plot points, the budget stretches really thin. You can only allocate a few words to each element. Or you blow the budget.

Setting a budget

For a five hundred-word short story, I budgeted for:

• one location; an estuary
• one idea; covering up a crime
• two characters; a career criminal and a novice
• a single plot point; disposing of evidence cleanly

That gave me about a hundred words for each of five elements (two characters, remember). It’s never that simple. I chose to  scrimp on the location and plot detail, in order to add depth to the characters, conflict and dialogue.

How I spend my word budget is a creative choice. But if the story is a commission, a writing prompt, a competition entry, or part of an anthology, I can’t exceed my allocation. That usually means tight editing and revision to stay within budget.

Balancing the Budget

When the word budget is under strain, there are three choices;

• cut the number of elements,
• write sparingly, and spend fewer words on the same number of elements
• expand the word budget to fit the available content. Easier with a novel. Not so with flash-fiction.

Non-fiction also contains all of the MICE elements. Memoir needs them all to tell a coherent life story. Instructionals, too. The milieu is the problem environment, ideas and events are the concepts and learning points. Character includes the notional instructor behind the training; formal, informal, academic, comedic.

Acts, Chapters and Scenes

Novelists have to watch the word budget as much as any other writer. Novels have structure. They have story arcs, and character arcs within those. Whatever the final word count, the component parts of the novel exist within certain constraints.

Whether it’s three, four or five acts, the story requires balance across those movements. Each chapter has to accomplish a given amount of character, conflict and plot. Wildly unbalanced word counts across chapters annoy readers and ruin the story structure.

It’s the same with scenes. Think of each scene as a self-contained short story with it’s own MICE.

Making a scene

Go with the Greeks. The ancient playwrights kept to the unities of time, place and action. Scenes within a novel usually take place in one time and place, with one dominant action or plot point. Now add in some characters. And some secondary plot. Add some back-story and reference previous scenes. How much of your word budget do all those elements use? Is there anything left?

Personally I hate obsessive word-counting, especially during revision. But think of it as watching the word budget; it’s an essential writing tool. It keeps the whole story and the moving parts in shape, no matter the story length, form or genre.