Things They Do Not Teach You in Writer School, #17

[swan_tower]

So as I mentioned before, I think this book is going to run a little long.

How exactly do I know that?

Nobody ever talks about this in books of writing advice, at least not that I’ve ever seen. Nor have I heard it being discussed in creative writing classes (though if your teacher taught you this, I’d love to hear about it). We all know writers need a variety of skills, things like characterization and plotting and the ability to string together an interesting sentence . . . but nobody talks about how you learn to tell how much story you’ve got in your hand.

I thought of this because I was doing some calculations, trying to figure out how hard I would need to drive myself to get a draft done by the end of the month. It’s a little tricky, doing that math when you don’t actually know what goes on the other side of the equal sign. I knew I couldn’t fit the remaining plot into ten thousand words; fine, that means I’ll overrun my target length of 90K. By how much? Not sure. Well, okay: if I wrote two thousand words a day instead of one thousand, then I could write 26K by the end of the month. Ooof, no, way overkill — there’s no way this is 26K of plot remaining. Somewhere between 10 and 26. 15-ish, maybe? That sounds about right . . . .

How do I know this? I can’t even really tell you. I am not the sort of writer who says “this chapter will consist of four scenes, two of them one thousand words long and the other two five hundred.” The scenes are as long as they need to be to get the job done, and I find out how long that is by writing them. I keep forgetting to put in chapter breaks, because for four years I wrote Onyx Court novels that didn’t have any; now I go back and drop them in wherever there’s an appropriate point within a certain range of wordcount. But I can only forecast by approximation: can I get Isabella off Lahaui in a thousand words? Definitely not. Two thousand? Ehhhh, maybe . . . (Verdict as of tonight’s writing: nope, definitely not.) I won’t need five thousand, that’s for damn sure. Somewhere between 2 and 5.

I have to do this all book long. I want to write a 90K book; that means I need to be able to judge how much stuffing goes into the sausage. I sort of weigh it in my hand as I go, looking at the casing, trying to decide whether I should pack more in or not. Eventually I start to feel like okay, we’re at the point now where it’s time to pull things together and wrap them up, rather than adding in new stuff. Within a certain margin of error, I’m right. (When Ashes ran 30K long, I saw that coming a mile off. I hadn’t even finished writing Part One when I e-mailed my editor to say, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.)

Nobody taught me how to do this. I don’t know if it can be taught, because the answers can vary so much from writer to writer. What one person knocks off in five hundred words, another might spend two thousand on. Even if you’re the sort who outlines ahead of time instead of making it up as you go along, you need a sense for how many words it will take you to say something. And I’m not sure how you acquire that sense, other than by writing a lot and seeing how many words you end up with.

All of which is just sort of me rambling, because wordcount has been on my brain lately. But it’s one of those things I never really see discussed — a skill nobody tells you you’ll have to acquire.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[scribblemyname]

I noticed after writing a ton of shorts that I was able to start guesstimating how many words it would take me to get through a scene or story. I don't think it can be taught. I think it's something you have to learn and execute by feel. You can teach the mechanics of driving a car, but that innate knowledge of how big your car is and how tight or loose to turn it comes with practice. After a while, you get in and you just know.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The car comparison is a good one, yeah. Even getting out there with a tape measure to write down the dimensions of your car will not give you that sense of whether you still have clearance on the right-hand side.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

I seem to have a good handle on getting books in that 90k - 100k sweet spot (even when I angle for 80k, it still ended up at 95!) after my first draft ever hit 126k and I'd gone into it thinking there's not enough plot! This is a skeletal and bare bones barely-plot! Cause you're right, no one tells you. I've read a lot of advice and took a couple writing classes and no one's ever said "btw, 'tell the story in the length it needs' is all well and good, but for marketing purposes it has to fit some major size constraints and here's some tips...." Even if it can't be taught I'd love to have gotten some warning about how tough it can be to do, or as something to watch out for.

But man oh MAN, if I could get short stories to behave. "I'm gonna write a story about a guy who makes dresses for a woman who turns into a beast! It won't take long at all!" And then I have the most perfect novelette I ever wrote. Or maybe it's more, if I could stop deluding myself that "sure that's a tiny story!" when I want to roll around in the details.

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity-- what are these major size constraints?

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

Depends what you're writing, but for example:

Officially a short story is 7.5k words or less, but most pro markets prefer 5k or less with varying degrees of firmness. If you're looking to sell short fiction, this is the one I really try to keep in mind. You might put a story as 8k words on duotope/grinder and it'll come back with markets that'll accept it, but you go to their website which says "5k and under strongly preferred" even if they technically accept longer. Annoying enough that I just added notes to each market about who has a 5k limit.

A novelette is 7.5k to 20k (though it's nebulous and people have variable definitions of what makes a novelette). Very few markets for these but from what I see 20k is a sweet spot for e-pub serials.

Some places will publish up to 10k words as a "short story," like Beneath Ceaseless Skies (and that may be a reason I find their stories more satisfying than some other markets).

A novella is about 50k words.

A YA novel is generally 60k words. Unless it's fantasy and then it can get up to 80/90k.

Most novels are in the 90 - 100k range.

These're generalities and the more established you are the more flexible they become, and the novels can depend a lot based on genre. Fantasy/SF can run longer, though I've heard that editors are edgy about first time authors who break the 100k barrier.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I would say there are two non-identical frames to keep in mind: the official one, and the practical one.

In SF/F, a short story is officially anything up to 7.5K, a novelette is 7.5K to 17.5, a novella is 17.5K to 40K, and a novel is 40K and up. Those are the guidelines for the Nebula awards; if you sell something that's 50K, it will not be in the novella category.

The practical one, as you said, varies depending on context. A short story market may not take anything over 5K (leaving out some actual short stories), or may take up to 10K (including some novelettes). If you're over 7 or 8K, your available markets drop precipitously. 50K? Good luck selling it anywhere; just about the only people publishing those are small presses, and many of them prefer to work with established names.

I would say most adult SF/F falls into the 80-120K range, with a sweet spot for new authors around 100K. If you're writing epic fantasy, though, 120K would be short: those run 200-400K, the latter being a fairly hard limit where they simply can't bind the damn book anymore. :-P This is why selling an epic fantasy right out of the gate is extraordinarily tough: you're asking the publisher to gamble a lot of money and resources on an unknown name.

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the detailed answer! I've always thought word count restrictions would be a lot looser than that, especially since there seems to be such a wide variety on the sf/f end of things; I didn't think about there being a difference for new authors/established authors. Good to know. (Of course, for me, the problem is generally underwriting, as opposed to overwriting, so I probably don't have to worry about that 100k upper limit...)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I feel like the margin of error is a larger percentage of the total the shorter you get. A story estimated at 3K may turn out to be 5K instead; it is much rarer that a novel estimated at 90K will turn out to be 150K instead. (Though it does happen.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I've seen it discussed, but in so rote a manner as to be useless. I suspect it is one of those things that natural long-writers learn to gauge. (When I talk to many natural short-writers about having the shape of a novel in my head, and how I can sense how much of that shape is done, they just shrug as if I was channeling Porky Pig.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, but don't the short story writers do the same? They're just holding a smaller shape in their heads.

[scribblemyname]

Yes! As a writer of flash fiction (mostly), short stories (moderately), and novelette+ length, I can tell you there is an art to knowing how long will it take to get through a short work. The difference is we think less in stories and more in scenes with short work, so our terminology is different. When I hit a short idea, I know that I have good odds it will end up somewhere between 300 and 5000 words. (I know, real helpful.) But once I plunk that first idea down, the one scene, then I have a better idea of what other scenes I need and the kind of scenes tell me how long the whole story will be.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

So I would think (I feel the same way about short work, once I finally understood that a short piece was not a novel crammed down into fewer words) but like I said, I talk that way and got total misunderstanding. So clearly there are different ways of perception.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is a good point. I found it tremendously useful, when learning to write shorts to length, to think in terms of editing structure as opposed to screwing around deleting or adding adjectives. But what I know isn't really transferable to anyone else because the way I allocate wordage to things like characterization and plot won't match exactly for anyone else, as you say.

(And as a side note, I don't believe I've ever been asked once to make a short work shorter. If they ask for a length change, they always ask for more words, including the one 900-word story I was asked to expand to 1,400 words.)

[marycatelli]

I found that if I had covered x% of my outline in n words, then n words would prove to be x% of whatever work it was.

I have to write the x%, because the ratio varies. What fun!