Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

What the Statistics mean to Me

What the Statistics mean to me

Sometimes my ideas on writing don’t garner much interest. No doubt this is probably the case once more. One of the things I have always looked for when presented by statistics is some explanation of what the compiler thinks they mean.

There were roughly 3,250 words in the chapter.

1. Backstory: 200 words 6%
2. Character Development: 400 words 12%
3. Scene Setting: 400 words 12%
4. Exposition that moves the story: 1000 words 31%
5. Dialogue that moves the story: 1150 words 35%
6. Foreshadowing: 50 Words 2%
7. Symbolism: 50 Words 2%

The first question I have is does this chapter represent a norm in the way George Martin writes or is there a significant amount of variation between one chapter and the next. I could do the analysis for say ten chapters; however I won’t be taking the time. If someone else wants to do it I would be delighted to see if they get roughly the same percentages. For my part I will stop here because for one the chapter works and works well and the numbers confirm in my mind why it does.

First off the backstory is less than 10 percent. That seems about right. I get bored reading novels that load up the first few chapters with reams of backstory. Having read the novel in its entirety I liked the way the author fed it in as the work continued. Keep in mind that the components shown here can appear in other categories, for example backstory can appear in the exposition and dialogue that moves the action along.

Next I like to see the character of the characters expressed in the Dialogue and Exposition. For example Lord Starks explanation of a leader’s role in executions, tells a great deal about who he is. It also foreshadows, so my including of a line in a given category is arbitrary and the analysis I am using required judgment where there were overlaps…. i.e. where foreshadowing was revealed to the reader through dialogue.

The Scene Setting was about right in my mind. There was enough but the author did not go on and on talking about the weather, and topography of the land. Again much of this was shown rather than told in dialogue and the exposition that moved the story along.

This brings us to the two big chunks. ; The dialogue and exposition that moves the story along. This breaks down to roughly a third of the words in each category. When I consider my writing the dialogue would have been considerably more. I attribute this to my playwriting background, however I am not writing a play at this time, I am trying to write a novel. In a stage or screen play the consumer has a stage or screen to look at, where in a novel there is only the stage and screen of the reader’s imagination. In the Novel genre, it is necessary to devote a significant number of words to exposition that moves the story.

The final two components that evidenced themselves were foreshadowing and symbolism. There might have been some repetition as well but it didn’t jump out at me. These don’t require a lot of words but there are important ingredients that particularly in the first chapter need to be considered.

Writers new to the genre of Novels need to understand the word distribution into these categories. Just following the pencil or pounding the keys is not going to insure a chapter includes all the right stuff.