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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Der Sturmbrecher on May 24, 2010, 06:05:22 PM
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Hullo,
I've started writing a novel which I've been wanting to tackle for awhile. Sadly my writing is irregularly scheduled, but it's a start. From what I've seen, though, it looks like my work is too short. It just seems like I don't have enough words to draw it out long enough. Prior to the novel I've done some short stories, and I'm worried about making my book too short. Suggestions? Comments?
Thanks!
Rotrich Sturmbrecher
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Finish it anyway while you've got momentum.
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Don't worry too much about the length until you've finished a draft. Chances are things will change between starting and finishing, and there will be places that need extra scenes and such. Plus length can vary depending on the type of novel it is you're writing.
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Thanks folks! Wish I could write right now, but alas, PreCalculus is demanding my attention.
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Like they said, finish first, then look at the length. My publisher likes novels to be 100-125 K words, but states that a strong story line is most important.
Regards,
Kevin
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If it comes up short of a full novel it comes up short. Market it as a novella. Consider it a stepping stone to writing a full blown novel.
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Typical minimum length of an adult fantasy novel is 100,000 words or 400 pages. If its shorter also look into whether it can be marketed as YA, which typically have shorter lengths. My novel, Veil of the Dragon turned up short on page count and so I am following an agents direction and filling it in a little more. Important to remember the people we are wanting to publish us have to sell it and there will be inevitably certain rules of the market they have to follow.
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Typical minimum length of an adult fantasy novel is 100,000 words or 400 pages. If its shorter also look into whether it can be marketed as YA, which typically have shorter lengths. My novel, Veil of the Dragon turned up short on page count and so I am following an agents direction and filling it in a little more. Important to remember the people we are wanting to publish us have to sell it and there will be inevitably certain rules of the market they have to follow.
I hadn't heard that figure before. Thanks!
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Remember the immortal words of Stephen King (quoting a rejection slip he once got)
Second draft=first draft -10%
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But Stephen King also is a "big" writer. I don't mean famous, I mean he naturally writes excessively. He writes a WHOLE lot of words in his first drafts, so he has to trim. I write lean. My first non-NaNo draft came in around 66k words. I need to loosen up, not subtract 10%. All depends on what your natural inclination is.
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*shrugs* I find it helps keeps things tight when there aren't random tangents flying all over the place. That's the spirit of it I think.
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But Stephen King also is a "big" writer. I don't mean famous, I mean he naturally writes excessively. He writes a WHOLE lot of words in his first drafts, so he has to trim. I write lean. My first non-NaNo draft came in around 66k words. I need to loosen up, not subtract 10%. All depends on what your natural inclination is.
My first drafts almost always need an extra 20% added to the last third or so so that someone who isn't me has some hope of understanding what's going on, fwiw.
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Stephen King doesn't plot anything out. He just lets the story go where it wants to, and he's also extremely verbose. So there's likely going to be more that has to be edited out of his work than say something like Dresden Files where it's been plotted out. Plus some people, in rewrites, discover subplots that need more fleshing out, or details that they understand but that there isn't enough for readers to understand. And word length depends a lot on what kind of novel it is. An urban fantasy can be something like 100-150k words while an epic type fantasy can be up to 300k or more. Well, if you write like Robert Jordan, anyway. The NaNo goal is 50k, which I suppose could be typical for non-genre specific work, though I've never looked into that.
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My wife and I write together. Our latest novel (all most done, just revisions on the last chapter) I plotted and wrote 67K, also I put in plot tags where my wife dropped in her half of the story line. The two of us together create better content than either of us alone.
The real deal though is to run on the popcorn system. That is, keep writing. No one pops corn one kernel at a time, the reality of the publishing world is that, a book can take upwards of 4 years to hit print. Even books written on contract run a year or more from deal to publication. Research your market and write, write and keep writing.
Brandon Sanderson had the seventh novel he had written come out as his first book, just as he had finished his eleventh novel. That netted him a contract, and his ability to stay two years ahead of his deadlines, gained him (in part) the WoT contract.
So Write, Write more, and then keep writing. The trick is to fill the pipeline and get in front of the curve. And (you guessed it) Keep Writing. (Grin)
Best of luck,
Kevin
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True that.
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This has been quite educational.
So
100k+ words = Novel
50k+ words = NaNo (Is NaNo basically a Novella? I'm new to that term.)
Did I miss one?
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Vingette < 1000 words
Short Story 1,000-7,500 words
Novelette 7,500-20,000 words
Novella 20,000-50,000 words
Novel >50,000
That's how I've always heard it. But I wouldn't say any of those are quote typical unquote lengths.
NaNo is the abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month.
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Stories will write themselves to some extent....
What I mean that some stories can't be filled out to a novel and others need to taken into a 100K word territory to be fully told. Good writers know when a story is told and when it needs to be fleshed out.
Short stories are generally strightforward plots, where everything in the story relates back to that idea. Novels allow for subplots, but even they are tied into to the main plot. Characters in short stories have to established quickly, while novels can take time to add layers to their characters.
Sometimes, it is hard to get a handle on a story -- short stories ideas cannot be streched into a Novels and Novel ideas can't be stuffed into s short story. Knowing what a story will fit is a matter of experence and feel....
Craig
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Vingette < 1000 words
Short Story 1,000-7,500 words
Novelette 7,500-20,000 words
Novella 20,000-50,000 words
Novel >50,000
That's how I've always heard it. But I wouldn't say any of those are quote typical unquote lengths.
NaNo is the abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month.
I would say that a short story could be up to 10,000. A lot of magazines will take short story submissions up to, but not over, that length. Well, at least most of the magazines I've looked at, which were all speculative fiction.
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See like I said those are what I've heard, but I've seen other variations like novels being over 60,000 instead of 50. I'm trying to remember where I found it so I can make sure I'm not misquoting that.
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Chris Baty, the creator/founder of National Novel Writing Month, initially chose 50k words because that was the rough word count of a slim novel on his bookshelf (which one escapes me at the moment). In years following, they've kept 50k because they found it both doable for people who had jobs and families and yet a challenge for most.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is around 50k. So are a lot of the slimmer novels by Anne McCaffrey like Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums from the Harper Hall Trilogy.
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I think the defining line for what counts as a novel where the Hugo Awards are concerned is 40,000 words, fwiw.
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I think the defining line for what counts as a novel where the Hugo Awards are concerned is 40,000 words, fwiw.
"Aim high. You might hit something"
;D
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I think the defining line for what counts as a novel where the Hugo Awards are concerned is 40,000 words, fwiw.
Locus (a big sci-fi/fantasy magazine) also calls a novel anything above 40,000. And that's based on the standards set down by The World Science Fiction Convention.
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So, to frame a possibly better question. How many words do you need for it to be considered marketable to publishers nowadays? Does 50k still fly?
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From the rather extensive reading I've been doing (agent-shopping), no. That depends strongly on the genre, though.
Most agents say editors (and therefore the agents themselves) are looking for urban fantasy novels in the 80-100k range for a first novel. Once you've gotten the first couple under your belt, they're willing to let you go longer without giving you the hairy eyeball.
Young adult novels can be shorter. Epic fantasy is expected to be longer.
That said, I bet Flowers for Algernon would still get the nod from most agents/editors if it were published today, and it's a short one at also around 50k. Write great, and they won't care about the length.
That said, long or very short first novels are the exception. And, as the saying goes, plan on being the rule and not the exception.
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That is an important distinction. What qualifies as a novel, and what qualifies as a publishable novel.
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Most agents say editors (and therefore the agents themselves) are looking for urban fantasy novels in the 80-100k range for a first novel.
Fair enough; I am not particularly focused on urban fantasy or well informed in that specific direction.
That said, I bet Flowers for Algernon would still get the nod from most agents/editors if it were published today, and it's a short one at also around 50k. Write great, and they won't care about the length.
The novel version of Flowers for Algernon is an expansion from a rather successful shorter version, fwiw.
There's definitely been a trend since the 1950s and 60s to longer novels; on the other hand, there's also been a trend in the past decade or so, given the big-box bookstores' price-cap on hardback fiction, towards shorter novels than previous in the fantasy field. I know Charlie Stross' The Family Trade, the first logical-volume/story-unit of the Merchant Princes books, was split into two physical volumes on these grounds, only a few years after some things intended as multivolume were being published in single volumes because of the accepted wisdom being fat fantasy novels outsell thin fantasy novels.
To summarise the summary of the summary; William Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything.
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To summarise the summary of the summary; William Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything.
Ain't that the truth.
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Which is why you do agent research, find out what agents want, and give them that. Sure, you can sell a book that bucks the system, but that doesn't make it the SMART way to get a book published. That's why I said plan on being the rule and not the exception.
It's so unbelievably, ridiculously easy to get rejected. Why on earth would you want to give an agent an instant reason to reject you? Length will hit in the query letter. They won't even GET to your amazing, singular, one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime manuscript. They'll see, "This story is a completed alternate history novel of 210,000 words..." and hit the auto-reject button.
Let's just take one agent (my first-choice agent), Jennifer Jackson. She's Jim's agent, btw. She keeps a blog and very kindly posts the stats on how many query letters she's read in a given week, how many requests-for-partials she's sent out, what genres they were in, etc. I'll go back a post on her blog, since this past week she was at a conference and her numbers are a little off for her, but here's what she posted for the week of 5/7/2010:
# of queries read this week: 268
# of partials/manuscripts requested: 1
genre of partials/manuscripts requested: YA
400+ queries awaiting review
oldest query in the queue: 4/12/2010
ONE partial requested, out of 268 letters she read. ONE.
Now, you can go ahead and buck trends if you want. Against those kinds of odds? I'm doing everything humanly possible to make my first novel publishable. I'll write my 250k word epic later, once I've established some cred.
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TBH, once I've written things out I won't be sending to Jennifer Jackson. At least not with much hope. Wrong Genre. (see? staying with your main point.)
She's probably more flooded with requests than others due to her popularity.
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Jessica Faust of BookEnds receives around 50 query letters a day.
Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown gets around 125 a week (going by his "6,000 - 7,000 queries a year" quote, and that was in 2007).
In February of 2010, Janet Reid claimed to have rejected 50 query letters in ONE HOUR.
How many more do you want to hear from? The field is PACKED with would-be authors writing hundreds and hundreds of query letters. Do you really think I'm wrong about this? Or do you just want me to be because your book breaks a lot of the "what agents want" advice? All I'm saying is don't HAND them reasons to reject you.
Unless you (the universal 'you', directed toward the lurker who hasn't posted an opinion yet) happen to write urban fantasy. ;) In that case, please make every mistake in the book. Thin out the competition for me. Thanks!
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Um....I was....erm....agreeing with you.....
and adding that the fewer query letters someone gets the fewer rejections they need to send out...
...and I'm writing poli-sci fic. Nothing fantastical or supernatural. Completely out of her realm from what I hear.
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Um....I was....erm....agreeing with you.....
and adding that the fewer query letters someone gets the fewer rejections they need to send out...
...and I'm writing poli-sci fic. Nothing fantastical or supernatural. Completely out of her realm from what I hear.
Ah...
Well then...
Okay.
I wasn't trying to sound snotty with the question, it was an honest query if you thought I was wrong or wanted me to be wrong. I read a lot of writing advice blogs and threads, and the number of people who utterly refuse to believe writing is as competitive as it is simply beggars the imagination. I had to interrupt a thread where people had generally agreed that the more popular agents get a lot of queries, maybe a couple of hundred a month.
Maybe I should have let them persist in their happy ignorance.
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There is a reason why my 470kword Christian-mythos end of the world fantasy is not a thing I am trying to sell. (Actually, there's also the reason that it was mostly planned out between 1996 and 1998 and it's set in a very pre-9/11 world.) Even thought it would split neatly into three, four, or indeed anywhere up to nine volumes.
While not handing agents "this is unmarketable because it does not fit the market" reasons is a good plan, so is not handing agents "this is unmarketable because it looks like a generic rehash written solely with an eye to the market that does not have any actual orginality". If there's a middle path between that particular Scylla and Charybdis, it's not an obvious one, particularly in terms of how much gets left out if you sum up a novel of any lenght into a couple of paragraphs of elevator pitch.
Knowing that successful, major-award-winning novelists with careers and many books published still find the elevator pitch hellishly agonising is a comfort of sorts, but not that much of one. So is having heard publishing professionals talk about the publishing process at conventions, in that at least I am sure it would take a deliberate effort for me to write something as unsellably bad as some of the things I've heard mentioned.
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I'd pay to read that Neuro. :)
Even if it is pre-911 world.
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Have e-reader. Have price of coffee. ;)
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420k words?
I'd go as high as $20 :)
or I'd read the first 'volume' for $5. And if I got hooked, I'd happily pay $5 a volume for the rest.
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Yeah, there is sort of a narrow road between "follow all these rules to the letter" and "give us something we've never seen before". Objectively, my novel is very much a generic rehash. It just happens that I've been writing urban fantasy since the 1980s (mostly for my own amusement, a couple of things done for presents) as I love the genre, but now what used to come off as fresh and original is just the norm for the genre, alas. I'm still writing what I love, though. In the case of genre, I'm aware the odds are tilting slightly more against me given my subject matter.
The next thing I have in mind to write (aside from this stupid fanfic idea that won't go away) is more original and has fascinated me since the beginnings of the concept occurred to me a few months ago. To stay on topic, it's a genre-buster so the optimal length will be hard to determine, but the question of length doesn't come up for me until the first draft is done. So I'll write the thing, see how long it is, check out the market at the time, and adjust accordingly.
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There is a reason why my 470kword Christian-mythos end of the world fantasy is not a thing I am trying to sell. (Actually, there's also the reason that it was mostly planned out between 1996 and 1998 and it's set in a very pre-9/11 world.) Even thought it would split neatly into three, four, or indeed anywhere up to nine volumes.
Were you robbed by Tim LeHaye, author of the Left Behind series? JUST KIDDING!
From what I've seen and read and heard, it's strict adherence to /how/ you write, but complete originality on /what/ you write. You just need to stick with the preferred format of the genre you fit into. Am I reading it wrong?
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420k words?
I'd go as high as $20 :)
Two coffees and a spicy tuna roll. My absolute limit.
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Were you robbed by Tim LeHaye, author of the Left Behind series? JUST KIDDING!
You've been paying enough attention to my psoting about how Jim handles Christian-mythos stuff in the DV, I think to reaonably and accurately guess that how I write about it myself will not have much in common with Left Behind, unless you count "No ! You are doing it wrong !" as commonality.
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I have a proto-uber mythos fantasy series in my head. That will insult every religious leader in the known world.
Using Christian Mythos, but returned to it's pre-christian Pagan links. It's been in my head for 20 years, and I can't seem to get it into paper. But it is really fun to play with those Mythos and turn them on their heads.
Well, you can pay 2 coffees and a spicy tuna roll. But that does not preclude me from paying higher?
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Well, you can pay 2 coffees and a spicy tuna roll. But that does not preclude me from paying higher?
Bidding war ftw ?
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Bidding war ftw ?
^There's something redundant in it.