Novel Do you ever feel like its too short?

An almost perfect thread for me to read. I'm struggling with word count issues myself. Mine are more severe than this poster. First, I don't have 5 main protagonists, and second, my book is more in your face, there's not a lot of character development on the front end. My fear is, to much boring character development to start my book, would take away from the general impact of my book's strengths. Of course, I guess I could do a flashback later to pull in additional character development, to avoid messing up the rhythm of my book start. I actually just thought of that while writing this.

I feel it is a natural Novella, at 41,900 length. As a first time novelist, perhaps I have poorly designed my storyline to prevent my novella from being a novel. Maybe that's ok, maybe it's not.

But I tend to agree that whatever the story gravitates toward, is the proper length for the story.

I started out adding a whole lot of front end character development, basically dialing the main character back to being a boy, there's a reason for it. However, I do feel that it's going to make those critical first pages border on boring or monotone in some regards. I will be proof reading what I wrote, and see if it changes my mind. But at this point, I don't know, and even if I do spread things out, I am not sure about getting to 80,000 to 90,000 words if my storyline just won't support it.

Thanks for the thoughts here.

 

Awesome. This is what I've been doing as well. Guess I'll just keep adding until it's right!

Thanks for this. It helps a lot!

I hope it also helps the OP...

 

yes, scenes can be 'expanded'... also, you may find that you haven't set the scenes well enough to pull the readers into them, so can add more description of the settings...