Ever since I started my writing sabbatical a few months ago I’ve been having fun estimating the total word counts for the first drafts of what I’ve been working on. I’ve been using a pretty simple formula – it goes back to grade school and plain old division really.
currentWordCount / ( currentLineInOutline / totalLinesInOutline ) = estimatedTotalWordCount
Basically it’s just this:
I find how far I’ve gone in my outline and look for the specific line number and divide that by the total number of lines in the outline to get the percentage completed so far. (My outlines are all point form, indented code style semi-sentences, so line-length doesn’t really matter much.) Then I take the current word count of my story and divide it by the above.
So really I’m just dividing my current word count by the percentage of the outline done. No rocket science there.
But what amazes me is that it’s been surprisingly consistent since I started using it. It was ultimately off by about 500 words for the first story I wrote, which capped out at just under 12,000. And so far it’s consistently estimated my current story to cap out at between 19,000 to 21,000 words. I’m currently at 16,000 words.
Yay, maths!