A theme isn't what I tell you it is...it's what you want it to be...any theme is valid...what matters is how well you express that...and if your book gets taken up as a piece of coursework, and the lecturer says that your theme was what YOU thought your theme was, that's good! So, your theme about how hard it is to walk away...that could work. Does she regret being bad enough to give something up? Yeah, that's making it up to her sister, that could work for redemption. I have a problem with a god (rulers of the afterlife) imposing their laws...I found "Ghost" to be unpleasant...there's this bad character who's had a shitty life, done bad things just to get by, gets carried away screaming...there's this other bad character who's been a spoilt brat, done bad things out of greed, who also gets carried away screaming...where's the justice in that?
Nope, it's not. The average novel is 80k words - that's generally the "standard" that most people quote, although 60k is still borderline ok, and some novels can be 100-120k. At 40-60k you're generally looking at novels for younger audiences I believe, or Harlequin Romance type books. 5k-10k I think is classified as a short story. Your story length would leave you somewhere between a short story or a novella. I'd be inclined to say short, to be honest.
I think coherency has always been an issue with some fanfic. Admittedly I've read a a handful of very good fanfics, but it is literally a handful.
In regards to my last post on this thread, when I say a compilation its pretty open ended. I mostly mean using a few stories to supplement your main story. I would count giving your villain a back story as such. This would be mostly helpful if you were going through traditional publishing and didn't want this story to be too far away from your main story. That being said I don't have all the specifics. As far as using different names yeah it could totally be independent of the main I suppose if that's what you want. At the same time when I usually think of short stories getting published I usually think of them being part of magazines and such and not printed by themselves (granted I have very limited knowledge of publishing in general). Finally if you released this first it actually could be a good teaser (I know I am contradicting myself) and drum up hype for the main story. If you think it would not take away from the main story for the reader to have all this info first then go for it. It might even make for a good prologue.
Still not sure exactly what your suggestion with a compilation. Also no, I wasn't suggesting that I will change her name. I was saying that the story is so independant from the main story that if you didn't hear her name it is likely you wouldn't realize the stories are connected. Well not sure if it is a teaser in all honesty, as I mentioned, the connecting points between the stories is much more like Easter eggs.
I've always based the required word amount to be classified as a novel on how many words different awards require. For example I read mostly science fiction and the minimum word count to be considered for an award like the Hugo award for best novel is 40,000 words.
Novels are generally in the 80,000 area, that's what most publishers look for too. But there are a lot of amazing novellas out there, some of the most emotionally triggering stuff I've read have been novellas. There's nothing wrong with them.
I don't think you're wrong, longer work are often better and I tend to remember series much more easily than short works. 80k-100k words is quite few if you wants to expand an universe. On the other hand after having spent time reading fanfictions, I find the word-count limit for new writers a very good thing. Too many wannabe writers that forget to stick to the plot-line and babble all over the places for dozens or hundreds thousands words. If you are going to write an epic tales spanning two million words, you should be able to write a 80k words story worth publishing. Well otherwise you might try British literature rather American one. The former has more of a tradition to add things not directly related to the plot-line and build up the atmosphere, at contrario to the American style which is to clear everything that isn't relevant to the plot. (And that's a Frenchman saying that.)
Hmmm. That's an interesting observation. I'm an American with a BA in English from an American university who has been living in Scotland for nearly 30 years. I've read extensively on both sides of the Atlantic, and can't say that I agree with you on this. I think the preference for shorter novels is a very recent development, and isn't based on whether the novel is British or American. Take a look at the popular authors of 30 years ago (like James Michener, an American) and you'll find lots of examples of long novels that were selling like hot cakes. And these were not fantasy or science fiction. This 100,000-ish word limit is very new. Interesting that normal short stories used to be around 8-10,000 words long. Now they're shortened to 3-5000 words ...or less. Let's face it. People's attention span is poor at the moment, and getting worse. The days of immersive reading for most folks is over, at least for now.
Generally, I agree with you. But remember that Stephen King still sells millions of copies of 800-page novels, George R.R. Martin's books are anything but brief, the last Harry Potter book was a seriously weighty tome (especially given that the target audience consisted of kids), etc. People are willing to read long books, it seems, so long as they're familiar with the brand name. Not everybody wants a snack-size novel (I certainly don't).
I think lots of people would be happy to read long novels. The test is whether they're willing to PAY for them. Each words costs money - the author's time, the editor's time, and for print books the paper, ink, shipping, and storage costs. If someone's willing to pay $9.99 for an 80K word paperback, would they be willing to pay $19.98 for a 160K word paperback? I think there's a problem of diminishing returns on really long books. People are willing to pay a BIT more, I'd say, but not a proportional amount more. In general.
Yeah, but you won't sell a large tome as a first-time novelist any more. And 100,000 is NOT a large book ...but some people want them even shorter. I don't think Stephen King, if he were just starting out, would have a hope of selling long books. He wouldn't get past the query letter, where he has to state his book length. Once he admits that his story is 210,000 words long, his letter will go straight in the bin. Nobody is going to bother to ask to read the first 50 pages. Nor will they discover that he's a lively writer, on top of his game, and that umpteen people will love his stories to bits. Of course once you're a bestselling author, you can pretty much do whatever you want, but nobody wants to look at a long book from a first-time author. This has nothing whatever to do with the quality of the book. Length and quality have nothing to do with one another. Lots of long books are great, and lots of short ones are crap ...and vice-versa. The issue boils down to money, and the amount of pages it takes to print a long book. This has led to a general belief (certainly rears its head on this forum) among today's newbie writers that a long book equals a bad book. If you want to be a 'good' writer you should simply pare away all the 'unnecessary' trimmings down to the bare bones of the plot—and that is what will make a good book. That really bothers me. It's like saying people shouldn't write symphonies, because they can't be played in a 3-minute song slot on the radio. This relatively new length restriction is wiping out rich, immersive stories that take more time to tell.
I think genre comes into play as well. If you're writing fantasy, you can sell a very long first novel. There are first novels over the past number of years that demonstrate this. Fantasy readers seem to be OK with long novels, whereas if you're writing in other genres you may have a bigger hurdle to overcome.
I think there IS a tendency, though, for new writers to not be good at paring their books down. I mean, my first book was really long, especially for romance standards (I think it was about 150K words!) and when I look at it now I realize I could have cut a lot of it. I WISH I had cut a lot of it, and/or that I'd had an editor who could have made me do that. It still would have been a long book, probably, but it would have been BETTER if it hadn't been that long. So, sure, there are people writing fantastic books that deserve to be long. But there are also people writing books that are bloated and sloppy. In my experience, 90% of the time when I look at new writers who think their book just HAS to be super-long, I can find lots that could and should be cut. For that other 10% of the time? Okay, those long books are worth fighting for. But a lot of the time I really think it's just lack of discipline and lack of technique.
Even Michener, who wrote a few books in the 350K-400K range, stayed under 100K words for his first novel. I'm not sure that attention span is the issue so much as cost. Most of the changes in traditional publishing - the elimination of unagented submissions, the lack of desire to bring along a writer whose early works don't sell, the explosion of books by celebrity writers - have tracked with the takeover of publishing houses by publicly traded corporations and the resulting focus on the bottom line. I suspect that word count limits, which appear to apply much more stringently to first-timers than anyone else, are simply a way for publishing houses to tamp down the costs (and hence, the amount at risk) of publishing new writers. In addition to the folks @minstrel mentioned, I would include Tom Clancy. The Hunt For Red October was a lot shorter than some of his later novels, such as The Sum of All Fears and Executive Orders. All that said, in my initial draft of Rosa's Secret, I was too concerned with word count, to the point that I had several scenes that needed serious fleshing out upon editing. So, to me, word count is something the writer should not even think about until reaching the editing phase.
To underscore the potential, at least in fantasy, you can look at some debut novels from recent years. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian was about 240K (not shelved in fantasy, but it fits). Path Rothfuss' Name of the Wind comes in about 250K, from what I've read. Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself, about 190K. Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, closer to 200K. David Anthony Durham's Acacia, around 600 pages trade paperback (however many words that comes to). Some of those numbers come from a comment by Joe Abercrombie on a blog post on this topic, wherein he wrote: So...it can be done, at least when it comes to SF/F. But my take-away from Joe's comments is that it better be a damned good book.
I think it better be a damned good book regardless of length if you're a first time author. But, definitely, sf/f (and especially fantasy) seem to like longer books. It's all about knowing your market.
"Oh, and Ludwig? No more of these long boring symphonies, okay? You need to learn to write a nice, clean, three-minute pop song. Stick to one key, one time signature, AABA song form, and for God's sake hold it down to three chords! Can you do that? Great! I knew you had potential. I don't want to get your hopes up, but I think soon you might be as good as Neil Diamond."
Who among is us Beethoven? The once-in-an-epoch geniuses can always write their own rules. The rest of us?
Sure, go for it! I mean, we all have our own goals for our writing, right? I think we'd almost all like to get lots of books published, make lots of money, have a meaningful creative outlet, etc. But each of us is going to rank those goals in different orders of importance, and each of us is going to have different strategies for the best way to meet those goals. Fair enough. If a person's primary goal is to get a book published, I think that person should learn and follow the expectations within their chosen genre. But if artistic expression is a more important goal, or if the person wants to be a breakout super-star and will settle for nothing less, then... okay. The genre expectations probably aren't as important.
I've never liked this kind of argument. How can we know if we're Beethoven if all we're allowed to compose are commercial jingles? How can we know if we're Shakespeare if we're restricted to Hallmark cards? My point is, Beethoven isn't Beethoven if he only writes commercial jingles. Give him the space and creative freedom he needs and he'll amaze you. You only become a genius if you're allowed to experiment, to work in your favorite form regardless of commercial potential. What kind of world would it be if Beethoven were indistinguishable from Neil Diamond simply because he's forced to work in the same form?
Whoa, who's "allowing" or "restricting" or "forcing" anyone to do anything? Write what you want. Absolutely. And publishers will publish what they want, and readers will read what THEY want. We're all doing what we want! Everyone's happy! It's just when you start wanting OTHER people to do what you want that things get tricky. For example, if you want publishers to buy your book... you should probably look at what their expectations are.
Yes, it comes down to an author's goals. If you want to achieve the success of commercial writers who write the most popular, commercial fiction, then you're odds will be increased if you also write commercial-style fiction, employing the same approach to writing that those who have succeeded employed in their own works. But not everyone has to, or should, have that as their goal.
