Word Count

I love words.

I enjoy hearing them. I enjoy reading them. I enjoy writing them. I take great joy in a narrative crafted with just the right combination of phrases.

As a young girl, I scribbled furiously on pale blue spiral-bound paper. I wrote stories beneath that glittery cover and dreamed of the day I’d be a real author. I imagined the way I’d sign my name in the inside fold of my penned work. I dreamed of what I’d look like in my 20s, 30s or 40s, my smiling face and curly hair branding it as mine. I pined for love and wondered whether I’d have a family in that photo on my someday book.

Many moons have passed since those hours I spent in creative bliss and the words at my fingertips.

My head is cluttered, and my free time is nonexistent. And yet, somehow, I’m still writing. I’ve traded the tattered childhood notebook for a refurbished Dell, and the words flow in spurts between sleepless nights, stressful months and lack of meaningful inspiration.

It’s no longer easy, and the words tell a different story. They tell of life and love and the Lord. They betray my steely resolve and capture the insanity of my days.

As I near the completion of a book four long years in the making, I’m obsessed with one unfortunate dilemma: my book isn’t long enough. I open the manuscript often now to add a few paragraphs or edit a particular section, and each time before saving I check the Word Count. Sigh.

For someone with 32 years of writing bottled up in anticipation of this work, you’d think I’d have plenty.

But I do not.

Word count matters, and I’m at least 10,000 words short. That is a lot of words, people. A lot of words.

Words count.

We each have that one thing we knew we’d do for our kids, right? The one thing we wanted to teach them or show them or help them understand. Maybe something we didn’t get, maybe something we loved. For me, it was always words.

Even while pregnant, I was adamant that I would instill a love for words in my child(ren). I took great care to speak clearly, in complete sentences, even from their newborn days. I instructed on proper grammar and taught them words well beyond their age and stage. I gently corrected when my boys used the wrong tense and helped repeat the right phrase or usage. Over time, they have each developed exceptional vocabularies, but this was done with intention and care. It is no accident.

After my oldest struggled for nearly a year to enjoy reading, something clicked in the past six months, and his appetite for words continues to grow.  In the meantime, I’ve started to notice that one of my little guys, Toby, has the unfortunate reality that his little brain is working harder than his mouth knows the words. We experienced the same thing with Sam at this age. Toby has started to stutter. It happens when he is really excited and always when he has something very important to say and wants to get our attention.

As we piled on the couch one night this week for our bedtime reading marathon, I quickly flipped through a new favorite, How to Train Your Train. In my haste to get through the book, I didn’t notice that Toby was trying to tell me something. As I sped through one very long paragraph, I noticed little fingers on my left cheek and then my right. A sweet voice said firmly, “Muh..muh..mommy, Muh…muh..mommy ….” And then that little guy, clutching my face with his small hands, physically moved my eyes away from the book and pulled me to look right at him. He took a deep breath, stared at me sternly and said clearly, “Mommy, I was trying to tell you something. Listen to my words.”

So I smiled apologetically at that charming child and earnestly asked him to tell me what he wanted to say.

As I listened to him ramble about how Papa was supposed to take him to the train area in St. Louis but didn’t do it and how he was very upset and wanted to make sure we called Papa to tell him that we really needed to go to the train area (all the while Sam was interjecting correct grammar and the fact that when Toby said train area he really meant the train museum), I just sat there in love with my boys.

They learn new words daily, sometimes by the hour. As they grow in size and strength, I’m amazed by these miracles I’ve got the privilege of raising. Kids have a way of bringing home reality faster and more poetically than just about anything. “Listen to my words,” he said.

So I did.

Having articulate children continues to be my parenting goal, despite battling the Ozarkian slang of our region and boyhood potty talk daily. However, the fact remains that through my deliberate focus on language, my boys are used to hearing me, quite simply, narrate life.

When I watched the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction with my husband, I remember laughing in disbelief, explaining to him that I, too, narrate my existence, so to speak. I find it happening in the oddest ways. I’m in the midst of a conversation and start identifying adjectives to describe how someone is speaking. I’m concerned about any number of stressful issues and find myself writing the tale out in my head to make sense of it all. I do it without thinking. I do it without telling a soul. I do it as easily as breathing and without record or need to dwell on it. I do it all day, every day, with my kids while we go through life and I instruct them how to use these wonderful things called words. 

And so, between the writing and the reading and the voices in my head (I swear I am not crazy), there’s a whale of a tale in my noggin' that I need to finish. For myself and my boys and three decades of counting words.

Despite my trepidation at the word count challenge, I’m going to take advice from my darling three year old to move past my writing stutter:  Take a deep breath, stare sternly (at my trusty laptop) and let the words come.

Harold Crick: But you have to understand that this isn’t a philosophy or a literary theory or a story to me. It’s my life. 

Jules Hilbert: Absolutely. So just go make it the one you’ve always wanted.