I used to submit stories to magazines a few years back. Most of them had rules for submission. It had to be in a particular format. Word or PDF. It had to be in a particular genre. The title should be in this font and the body should be in the other. Spacing should be single. It should be addressed to the right editor. It had to have the author bio. And so on and so forth.
An important criteria was word count. Most magazines had a particular word count that they published. Some said minimum 1500. Some said not more than 2500 words. Some said between 1000-2000 words. Others who published flash fiction had restrictions of 500 words or lesser.
I used to stick to the word count religiously at first when I was unpublished. I used to cut out portions that I felt were good to fit the word count. And when I fell below the prescribed limit, I used to add words to get to the minimum word count, though I knew they didn’t add to the story. A couple of times, stories got rejected due to the word count being higher or lower by 15 or 20 words.
But as I started getting published, I realized that the word count restriction didn’t matter that much. When my bio mentioned names of past publications, they were a bit flexible on word count. Over time, a few magazines clearly started liking my writing and, slowly, they started accepting a larger percentage of what I wrote, irrespective of word count. It was a case of my writing matching the interests of their editors and readers.
That’s when I realized what really counts. It wasn’t the number of words. It was something not countable.
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