Post-editing word counts?

I don't really know whether word counts should go up or down or by how much when you edit a novel. I'm sure it's probably one of those things that varies quite a bit from person to person, but I was just wondering if anyone who has done nanowrimo before (or somehow has completed an edit on this year's novel already) knew what their wordcounts were before their first edit as opposed to after.
Mine started out just over 90000. I've only edited 6 out of 25 chapters and it's currently a little under 89000.

There are no hard and fast rules to word counts. Once nano has finished and you have attained your 50k, you are officially a winner. That's all that matters. If you wanted to get your novel published, it is likely that, after editing, you will have cut some scenes, added others and padded out your characters a bit. But that's assuming that, like me, you finished your story around the 50k mark.

Even if you finished your story at 90,000 words, the same is likely to be true to an extent. But it is important to realise that editing doesn't automatically mean cutting the final word count. Have you re-read your novel in its entirety since you finished it? If not, I suggest you do that before continuing with your edit. In particular, check your story for pace and progression. Just put in a marker every time you come to something you think needs attention and then return to it later.

I usually lose about 5-10% of the length in the editing. I'm of the school that when drafting, chuck it all at the wall and see what sticks. It's easier for me to take out something that I find doesn't work later on than to add something in later when I'm not in the flow of writing that story. Which isn't to say I don't end up adding things, I just find it harder!

So after cutting chunks of stuff there's also tightening up the prose. Don't say things twice, remove excess words. Get rid of as many of the dialogue tags as possible! I find it's good to have plenty of those in the draft to make sure I'm not confused over who said what later! Then in the edit I get rid of what I can where it's clear who's speaking.

On the other hand, some people write very spare in a first draft - especially for NaNoWriMo and later on fatten it all up. It really depends on your draft if it's going to grow or shrink.

That's one of those 'depends on the author and the story' things. One of my friends comes close to doubling her word count, another halves it, and I stay in the same general ballpark. You may find you need to add or remove a scene. Loose writing might need tightening or sparse writing might need expounding.

With time and practice you'll get a feel for the length of the final product before edits. Until then, anything can happen.

My word count usually doubles by the end, but it depends how much editing I need to do. I'm editing my JuneMo novel right now and my second draft word count is pretty close to the first. For this book I didn't need to add a great deal, just change the context in which it was happening, so while it is a tighter rewrite and scenes got cut, the word count is similar.

Personally, I increase my word count, since I tend to rush through things and find that I need to add more to make the story flow better. If you are opposite of me, then you'd be cutting down a lot. If you're neither, then it's not going to change a whole bunch - as said before, it very much depends on the story and your writing.

I suppose it does depend on the author, but I believe in word counts going down in revision. Those to whom this doesn't apply (like some here) probably know who they are already, but I suspect there are more of us with the opposite problem. I could be wrong. It could be fifty-fifty. I know for sure that *I* need to cut my story down.

Actually, I'm going to hazard a theory: discovery writers (people who make up most of their story as they go along) tend to have to reduce their word count, and outliners (people who knew their full story in quite a bit of detail at the beginning) are more likely to need to add to it.

I just know that the discovery-writing process adds a lot of irrelevant details to the story. I'll write a whole long dialogue that sort of carries me along as I write, but in that whole half-page of dialogue there will be one or two exchanges that have real weight, show who the characters are, affect the plot. It's the equivalent of having ten mediocre ideas so you can have one good one, then you keep the good one and throw out the others. So the revised version of that dialogue is going to be those two exchanges plus a short lead-in to put them in context, period. Much shorter. All that other stuff was just my way of digging through my brain to find the good bits. That's necessary in my style of writing, because for me those good bits are the way forward, they are the building blocks of the plot.

On the other hand, someone like FlipFlyFall, above, sounds to me like an outliner, someone who "rushes through" the story because he/she knows where it's going already, has a fully-laid-out plan. I would guess that that's the difference.

Mine generally goes up.

I prefer to handwrite a first draft; transcribing it makes it a second draft. While I DO cut (a lot) I also tend to expand and write more... so the cumulative count ends up going up.

Mine can do either. Generally it goes up (when I realize that my scene is really blank. I tend to put in the bare minimum, and then be like, "WTF?") Then it goes down (as I cut needless stuff). Haven't started on this year's yet. But if it's like most it will go 60K --> 100k --> 70k.

More or less.

My first drafts are always very lean, so it's normal for me to add a lot. This year's novel finished at 74k. It's now almost 89k, in its fourth draft.

When I finished my novel, it tallied in at around a little over 100k words. I read it once and put it away for a couple of day, then I read it again to see if I felt the same way about some of the things that I was weary about on the first read through. Then I read it a third time and decided the ending was wrong. I've edited twice, cut some sections and added others. It now stands at a little over 105k. But now when I read it, I don't have the worrisome feelings that I had the first time, which is a step in the right direction.

--JSC

I've been doing some hard edits on a draft of mine (basically creating the...third draft? now). Each chapter is about 10k, and by the time I'm finished,they end around 9k. So, mine tend to go down a lot. But at this point I'm done adding and deleting scenes entirely so I'm just cutting out the fat from the writing itself.

I'm about a third of the way through my second draft, and so far I've gone from 105k to 94k. I still have to add some major scenes in the middle, so that'll probably bring the wordcount back up again. I'm thinking that when I'm finished I'll probably be below 100k, but not by much.

Well, I don't know nothing about nothing, professionally speaking, but when I sent my first draft out to the Wise Council, their general consensus was "boy, this sure is nice - I love the characters and the dialogue and the plot - but it feels like the whole thing happens on a cardboard sound-stage; there's no history or setting or description here, and some of the backstory isn't explained." Fixing that took me from 96k to just about 150k, which makes me cringe every time I think about it. Dang!

Mine extends. I find myself putting in more detail as I edit because when I'm on a roll during first draft I skip the minor details that are still important but too bothersome to my first draft mind to deal with. I also put in more character descriptions that I've skipped over and fill in any plot holes that may have been left behind in the shuffle of trying to get all my ideas down before they disappear.

I just finished editing through my story for the first time... and it shrunk to just over 26,000 words. Most of this editing round, though, was cutting everything out that I thought sounded stupid. I'm absolutely certain that my book will get longer again, but it's kind of depressing to look at my novel and realize "Wow, over half of it was lousy and needed to get scrapped."
But at least this way most of the stuff left is good stuff... maybe... when re-reading what I wrote, some things made me shake my head at how much junk I can write, but there were a couple of beautiful passages of dialogue that said exactly what needed to be said and made me feel all proud of myself again.
Next edit, I plan on adding words, rather than deleting them. My novel will grow again. And I might even have some descriptive passages...

My rough draft was just over 60K words. I managed to cut out over 3K in the last few drafts, and am still cutting out fluff.