In high school we always whined, "How many words does it have to be?" If the size was indeed in words I felt doomed. I could easily use a 1000 word complaining that I could never think of 500 to write. But sometimes the answer would be in lines or pages in which case I was ready because we had a Pica typeset typewriter giving me 10 characters to the inch instead of the dreaded Elite 12. Next bonus was double spacing: "Miss Pedantic, do you want it double-spaced to allow room for all the corrections you will need to pencil in?" I prayed for double spacing because our SCM would also do 2.5 line spacing. If Ms Pedantic ever noticed, she never said so. Now I can't shut up, I write too much. See? I haven't even posed my question yet. So how many words for say a romantic novel (not that I would ever pen one, of course)? But Open Office tells me I am at 44,000 and the story is nowhere near told. There is sadness in Christie's life and John burns a lot of lines in mild humor cheering her up (grammar, I know). I have tried to print a bit of it as paperback size trying to get an idea by comparative thickness. Then I found you kind folks who are full of ideas, knowledge, and advise. So I look forward to some more of that now, if you please. Thanks, John
I'm still not exactly sure what your question is. If you're asking how long does your novel have to be, there are many posts on here about this subject already - including "how long?" and "is this too long?" or "is this too short?" Maybe do a search for your exact question and see what comes up? Or ... just write until you're done and worry about the length later.
The usual guideline for first novels is 80,000 to 120,000 words, with a real preference for keeping it to 100,000 or less. Romances would tend to be a bit less, I think. I wouldn't worry about word count at this point. In fact, if you can turn word count off on your software, do it so that it stops being such a distraction. You can start worrying about it when the first draft is done and you begin editing. My first novel attempt was written on software that did not list word count, and I didn't even think to check it until I was ready to start sending out query letters. When I did, I almost had a heart attack - it was something like 420,000 words! It turned out that there were a lot of common novice errors in it that tended to fluff up word count - way too much incidental dialogue, lots of needless description, too much information provided, not leaving enough to the reader's imagination. So, I went back to editing and eventually winnowed it down to 140,000 - still too much. At that point, I realized that it had already served its purpose as a learning experience, and I moved on to my next attempt. So, go write, learn and enjoy. And forget about word count for now.
Thanks Ed, I am glad I stopped by here on my way out. I was all pumped up to post to the humor page and found out I don't yet qualify. Then I remembered I had been waiting hours for a reply to my question and here you are. Your posts are interesting as well as informative. Thanks for cheering me up. I am using Open Office and though there may be a setting to do otherwise, but as installed no word count. I must check properties for that. 420K, wow! Best Regards, John
I too worried about word count at one time. My first and only novel that I've written is 85,000 words. Then, I started to write "short-stories". I called them short because they were much shorter than my novel. 13,000 - 24,000 words. Now, I really don't care. I have a story to tell and if I tell the whole story in 15,000 words, so be it. If the next one takes me 25,000, so be it.
Not saying that Ed's book had this problem, but I've read the occasional story that could have been cut to a third its size simply by deleting the first two-thirds of it. Nothing important would have been lost. It turns out that some novice writers seem to want to start their stories with the main character's birth, when nothing important happens in his life until he's thirty years old. Watch out for that sort of thing!
Yeah, it takes many a chapter, and lots of begottings before you get to the hot stuff in the book of Ruth. jh
It was varying degrees of 1) eliminating an entire subplot that really should have been its own story, 2) too much incidental dialogue (ie. too much like real conversations), 3) too much description, including too many things not left to the reader's imagination, 4) too much backstory (almost an entire chapter and then large parts of two others, much of which was backstory to a subplot) and 5) too many needless dialogue tags. I was most amazed by the fact that, while my initial efforts at editing had been relatively painful - do I really have to cut this? - once someone had pointed out the various types of errors I had made, I was able to cut and slash with mad abandon. But even with that, it took about a dozen times through the work to get it down to the 140K.
I experienced a similar situation with my novel. I was eventually able to hack off more than a third of it just by dumping over-writing. (I didn't have a extra subplot to dump, or I would have done...!) So. Did you find, when you started writing another novel, (assuming you have) that you no longer made those initial mistakes? Or has your first-draft style remained the same as before?
