Rhyming Story Word Count - Helpful Hack

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   A quick and dirty math hack to feel some control over your word count in the Rhyming Story Challenge.
Example:

“There once was a story in rhyme,
That I wrote in a limited time.
The word count was under,
Which felt like a blunder.
Yet having too many’s a crime!”

The stanza above is 30 words.

The word limit is 500 words.

500/30 means that one could write 16 stanzas just like this with 20 words as a buffer. So write your first stanza, count the number of words and then divide it into the total.

KNOWING that you have - in this example - approximately 16 stanzas to write your story you can actually use that to “map out” your story to a degree. This might help you to not get into the weeds on, say, a plot point or a scene or a description and use up too many words or stanzas.

This doesn’t always work, of course; but it has helped me stay more on track as I enter successive Rhyming Story contests.

Hope this helps!

Edited by KAnderson - 16 Nov 2025 at 9:36pm