Then I hit a point where the pacing and blocking, in the large scale, was off. Words got rearranged, and pushed back, and three new chapters, only loosely laced through with small fragments of existing material, and the word count went up again. In the second third of the book, words kept getting added, until I’d gained back five or six of those seven thousand words.
As I move into the last third of the book, the words are suddenly falling away again, info dumps and side conversations made irrelevant by the work done on the middle third. Yet I know there are things I need to add as well as take away this last third, because endings are the messiest, most fought-for parts of books for me, and, as lnhammer usefully pointed out last night, this one has the right emotional shape but a problematic plot–also normal at this stage. The ending is something I really do need many drafts to hone in on. I think I’ll continue losing words overall, but maybe not as many as for the first third. But it won’t really matter one way or the other, as long as the story is right.
Some words wind up in the final story. Some get revised and compressed. And some wind up being scaffolding, ladders and girders and supports that I can climb around on as I write (because as a writer I’m less scared of heights than in the physical world), and then take down again afterwards, with no regrets (okay, few regrets–there’s always a few things I love but cut anyway), so long as the final structure stands.