How do you know when to stop writing an idea?

Hello, Good evening/afternoon/morning to everyone in the house. [Another question please.. ]

So, I have an issue I would like opinions on.

The highest words count I have written is 161k words. I am still trying to increase it to 200k.

I asked other authors how they write books with 200k words and above. My author friends said they kept adding new conflicts and characters.

This means that a story idea can go on for as long as we want. A book of 150k words can become 300k words without filler chapters, just exciting scenes.

The questions I want to ask are these. How do you know when to stop writing an idea? How do you judge the estimated length you want your book to be?

I'm just confused.

 

Everything I wrote up to a certain point were short stories. I existed in that mentality. But then one thing I was working on grew to become a novel. When that happened, I found I slowed way down and discovered my novel-writing patience. You dwell longer on things, take more time, let the ideas expand, and the writing with it. Rather than taking a sinlge brief paragraph for something to happen, it might take a page now, with more reflection on the part of the narrator, or just more detail. Basically what I'm saying is if your stories are going to expand into novels, you need to expand and become a novelist. There was a thing Angela Carter wrote, in the Afterword to her first book of short stories Fireworks. Let me see if I can find it. Here:

I STARTED TO write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them. I was writing, therefore, tales.
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Of course she's being a bit symbolic here. It isn't really the size of the room that determines the size of the idea and thus the story, it's the size of the writer's consciousness that's capable of holding the story. It's like your mind is a workshop, and you need a very small one to craft short stories. But to make novels you need a much larger one, like an airplane hangar, with appropriately large tools. Fortunatley the consciousness is designed to be able to transform its size and capabilities. It might take a while, but once you're well and fully set on being a novelist and understand (more or less) the construction of novels, and have read enough of them to have the feel for them as stories, it should be a pretty automatic process. In fact of course it is, you couldn't do something like that through conscious effort.

For me it happened some ways into my story. The beginning is written like a short story, everything compressed to fit the smaller form of the story, and after a while it began to slow down and expand to fit its new purpose. I was surprized when it happened, I was a little lost for a while, I wasn't used to having the luxury of all this extra room to work with. It took me a while to adjust to it. But it did happen within maybe a few thousand words or so.

 

My first book is about 20k more words than the one I'm currently working on. There are fewer words, but the stories are both told within those ranges of words. I always aim for at least 100k, since my books are the everything sci-fi genre. I've heard that's a small sci-fi story. I have a four book series, and each book is going to be covering specific parts of the story. If I were to combine it all into one book, it would be well over 400k and that's daunting as a reader.

My question to you is why do you have to have 200k? What is the purpose of expanding it so far?

 

This was my first thought, too.

Why does it matter if it's 200k or 160k? What are you trying to write? If your story is complete at 160k words, well, that's the story. There is no need to go further. Novel-writing isn't a length contest last I checked.

It's hard to answer this without knowing more details about your project. Does it have a proper ending? Or does it just kind of end? If it ends in a satisfying way, then, there is your answer. A good ending is when it's a good point to stop.

If you have no ending at all and you just want to keep going because of that, then I suspect that your project has weak story structure underneath. The Three-Act structure, which is old and relatively simple, essentially says: Every story out there has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which are *drum roll please* the three acts!

In most cases, if you've reached the resolution of the main conflict after the climax, then that's the end. The "story arc" is completed.

Is it possible to keep going after that? It actually is. You just write another arc and you go through the three acts all over again. When you're done with that new arc, then you can start another. It can pretty much go on forever like this. But you shouldn't do that unless you have a reason to keep coming up with new arcs.

But to answer your question...

That can be achieved using an outline like the Snowflake Method. You outline based on a structure so your story is solid and well-planned. Because of that, you write a list of scenes, and you have a pretty good "picture" of your story. Assigning a target word count to each scene and then adding them all up will give you an estimate.

If you are a discovery writer and you have nothing planned at all, then obviously, predicting your word count is pretty hard.

But the essence of it is: Write the story. If the story has reached its ending, then that's when you should stop.

 

Hello @DonnaGene

I think you have some very good views from members thus far but I tend to side with @Dogberry's Watch and @ps102 in that is there any need to extend the word count just to reach a number.

For me, a great story is not dependent on length, but whether the arc of the story is satisfying and inspiring.

I was chatting to a writer friend not so long ago about series writing and they said that usually the 1st novel is the best and the latter ones are padding. This intrigued me as their view seems very valid but also pointed that more books in developing the original story was extended the same story.

I'm not sure if this view is completely accurate as I view a story (whether this covers one book or more) depends if the question of the overall theme of the story is answered. If this is and a story fits nicely in 100k words then I see no reason to extend it just to hit a target.

This is just a personal view btw, as I don't like writing to restrictions and word limits, though I do understand that having limited boundaries places more emphasis on writers to be more concise and remove redundant words without sacrificing your own style. I feel, if you are happy with the story then that's it. I have expanded many stories in hope that they read better but ended up bloating a nice story by slowing the story down too much that it lost all the paper and impact it had when it was shorter.

Maybe seek your beta readers and ask if they feel there is a need to expand more... if they think so then look to add. If your readers are happy then there is no need to add more.

 

Each genre has an average story length you can find with a search online. Fantasy typically runs about 80 k words, the epic fantasy subgenre tends to run higher. You never mentioned what genre you are working in. Personally, I stop when I feel the story is done. If I feel the story is to long for the genre expectations, I look at where it can be broken into a series.

 

That's very interesting @Xoic.

When I was a kid and young adult I had a lot of time to think and I would write the first act of novels, especially when I was on holiday and moving through big landscapes.

Until recently I mostly wrote when I went on long leisurely walks about town on a weekend and what came out were short stories that I could just about compress into flesh* fiction if I wasn't being precious about them.

Currently (temporarily I should hope!) I seldom have more than an a half hour spare, mostly in the same small spaces, and if I can write fiction at all its a neat little idea that I can just about plump up to a still thin flash piece.

Essentially you and Carter are saying that the radius of the sweep of your thoughts defines the radius of the sweep of the fiction you can conceive. I like it.

____
EDIT: Going to leave that typo in there. Freudian slip?

 

I have been noticing a trend recently, where multiple character POVs are basically short stories about that character, which are structured into a larger framework of a novel. So the two are not exclusive of each other.

 

Sometimes it does seem like the space you're in confines or contains your consciosuness or the expansion of your thoughts. I think that's mostly just symbolism though, when your thinking is very constricted. We tend to see correspondences between the macrocosm (external world) and the microcosm (inner world). It's how symbolism works. Otherwise, if we want to believe the space you're in literally constricts the size of a project you can do in it, then you couldn't write a novel indoors at all. You'd have to go sit on a woodpile like @Lifeline does when she writes, or in a field or something. Though I do find most of my best ideas occur while I'm walking outdoors, often to or from the grocery store, or when I go sit outside to think things through.

 

They're right. Depending on whom you ask (and which genre you're in,) they tell us that agents are not looking for books outside the 80K-100K (maybe 120K) range. If it's a debut, if you're going to try to pitch it as your first novel, you're looking at a hard sell, maybe not impossible, but very difficult. From what I understand, most agents won't even read past the word count in the query letter.

Believe me, I can identify. My first novel, Reset, is short at 60K, and my second, Curios, (still in the beta reading and rewrites stage) is currently 163K and likely to expand a bit as I edit. I 100% believe these are the perfect lengths for these stories. They're paced the way I want them paced, and they tell the stories I want to tell. I'm even proud that I wrote something so long without it getting boring or stupid, but the fact is, I'm going to have a hard time selling either to an agent. It seems short is better than long, so I'm going to give the whole thing a go with Reset, but I fully expect to be ignored by a lot of agents. Also, that 80K-120K thing is mostly just for debuts, so I'm fine with the second being long. Anyone who reads a lot knows that tons of books are published in the 150K-250K range. Hell, you even see 450K+ on occasion.

Aside from the debut publishing issue, there's still a problem with adding beat after beat after beat ad infinitum. I can't imagine being able to pace something like that and keep it interesting indefinitely. Which is not to say it couldn't be done, but it would be a struggle, for sure. I don't subscribe to any of the prescribed plotting methods. I don't believe stories necessarily have to fit any particular form, but I do know stories have shapes. The ups and downs, the laughs and cries and triumphs and terrors, they all have their places on the rollercoaster, and each story has a natural progression and length, whether planned or spontaneous (plotted or pantsed.) If that rollercoaster goes up and down over and over and never ends, people will want off.