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Article on Word Count
For anybody interested Mushens Entertainment has a really interesting post on their blog about word count and how to edit word count, including expected word count based on genre.
https://www.mushens-entertainment.com/blog/how-to-edit-word-count
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7 Replies
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Laure
Thank you for posting this. I have read it and printed it out as word count is often a concern for me.
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Hi Laure,
A really useful reference point and something of a relief to see that I am not breaking any boundaries! Appreciate you posting this.
Thanks
Ian
Author: Dancing in the Fire – Historical Fiction – 120k words 😅
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Thanks for posting this, Laure. It’s a thorny topic that has particular resonance for me. The first draft of my first completed (general/literary) novel clocked in at just under 250,000 words. It was a multi-generational saga with chapters set in the 1940s, 1970s and present day rotating and, finally, all coming together at the end as the thread running through them all became clear.
My first beta reader – whom I’ve never met – read it in two days, told me he found it hard to put down…. but it was too long (which I already knew, in my heart, but who likes slaughtering their babies?)
So I edited. And edited. And edited some more. Out went the whole 1940s story and the character reduced to occasional appearances in the later ones. The present day protagonist became single, which removed all of the problems he was having with his partner, and numerous other characters were removed and their significant contributions to the plot reallocated among the grateful survivors. Events were combined or compressed; a great deal of internal narrative silenced; and so on.
So now it’s sitting at 110,000 words and I cannot see a way to take anything out without losing the plot (literally) or rendering the main characters as one-dimensional.
I’m meeting a couple of agents at this weekend’s Festival Of Writing and asking them this question: should I press on with seeking an agent and publisher or accept that what I’ve produced is simply not of commercial length and best left in the drawer? I have to say, if this article is to be believed, the prospects don’t seem great. 😢
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Take heart. My first draft was also above 200K words. I initially got it down to 160, then 120, then 115, then 108 and it stands now at 103,000 which I view as a minor miracle and finally an acceptable length. It CAN be done although I admit that trimming those last several thousand was very challenging! You can do it!
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A little off-topic perhaps, but I do wonder whether the novella is going to be ‘in’ again pretty soon. Kindle, digital downloads (and Substack, of course) have separated the work from the constraints (practical and commercial) of the book-making trade and there must be any number of great stories that fall naturally at a word count much shorter than a novel but much longer than a short story. Plus, the predictable point about those app-scrolling teenagers who don’t have the reading stamina to stomach a whole novel… any thoughts?
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I too have wondered if novellas are becoming more popular – or if I just happen to have read several this year. For example: the excellent Nothing Left to Fear from Hell by Alan Warner, shortlisted for The Winston Graham Historical Fiction Prize and The Highland Book Prize; the bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi; and Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal.
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Thank you
This was super helpful especially the suggestions
I am an underwriter so my actions are interrogate mc inner world more consistently between action and develop more character back story
