The urge to pad writing

As I was preparing Friday’s post on Destiny, I ran into an issue that I’ve encountered a number of times in my writings. When I was proofreading the final draft I saw that I was very close to hitting 2,000 words, and the thought floated in my mind to add just a little more to my work. Two, maybe three, more sentences and I’d cross that magic threshold into the 2,000-word territory. Yes, what I had at the moment was all well and good and encapsulated everything I wanted to say, but think about how much better it would feel to add another entry to the 2,000-word writing piece catalog. It wouldn’t even be that hard—just insert an extra observation and/or opinion here, and another one there, and just like that I’d have that special 2,000-word satisfaction. I entertained this line of thinking for several minutes until my inner editor put a stop to the fantasy train. Yes, getting past the 2,000-word mark would be nice, but I’d be compromising the writing piece by padding it with material merely for the sake of achieving a particular word count. That extra material did not belong in this writing piece. I came to my senses, finished proofreading, and then moved on to preparing the writing piece for publishing. The urge to pad my writing had been resisted, that time at least.