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Dear Readers and Writers,
How many pages should a novel have?
(And please don’t say when it’s finished! Unfortunately, the Wildcat tales never end.)
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Comments
When should it end?
For me, the simple answer is when you have nothing more to say, all the loose ends are tied up and (for a romance) the happy couple ride off into the sunset.
Far too many novels just peter out and end pretty suddenly. Many of the pulp novels (or so called cozy literature) do that.
I've just finished the first draft of a Novel. When I started it, I thought that it might have 10 chapters. Then it got a life of its own and currently, it is 45 chapters and 176,000+ words. Am I pleased that I've got this far? You betcha although it has taken me off and on some 36 months to get this far. I wrote one chapter 3 years ago and never took it anywhere. After reading it again over a year later, I knew that I had a story but that chapter was not the right one to start the much larger work off.
When you are happy with the story that you are telling, end it. There is no right answer, there is no wrong answer. The novel is your baby and you decide when it can fly away on its own.
Samantha
A few more words of advice
is don't just work on one novel. There are times when it gets hard to make progress. Your muse is there but she is not cooperating. Use that time to work on other stories. Since I started on my novel in earnest, I have also written some 220,000 words of other stories.
My backlog for posting here is close to 400,000 words or 2+ years at one post per week.
Take time out to do other things and not write.
I've just returned from a week in a Gite in 'the Ardeche', France. I wrote something like 40,000 words but most of it was re-writing parts that didn't work. I have a few more days of editing and then I'm having a week off to build a new raised bed for my veggie patch.
The above works for me. We are all different so it might not for you.
Samantha
Define a novel
A short novel is about 40K words, 120 paperback pages. That's how long it has to be to be considered a novel for some literary awards. Many of the old Pulp Era novels were shorter, as little as 25K words, maybe 80 pages, even 20K, 60 pages. Really, that's more of a novella. Anything much less, less than about 40-50 pages, would be a novelette.
For published full novels, the average is probably more like 60-100K words or 200-300 pages. 200K words and 600 pages, and we are talking about an epic novel, like Game of Thrones, or Outlander, or Return of the King.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Here on BCTS
Here on BCTS I don't really care about novel length. For me all these nice stories could go on "forever". ;-)
I prefer chapters of 5-10k words which I can easily read in a single session. If they are much shorter they end before I really get into the story.
Martina
I had a teacher in high school who defined a story…….
Length by comparing it to a woman’s skirt - long enough to cover the topic, but short enough to keep it interesting.
As a woman who likes to read and who likes to wear skirts, those are pretty good words to live by!
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
That explains the length of my skirts
:)
Story lengths
Out in the wider world, there are some commonly accepted definitions of novella, novel, etc., that you would be expected to use accurately. Here's one web page that agrees with the general consensus: Short Fiction Forms: Novella, Novelette, Short Story, and Flash Fiction Defined
The 50,000 word qualifier for a novel is somewhat variable. The books of the 1960s and 70s were commonly much slimmer than you see nowadays. Publishers didn't like them that way, though the coming of the ebook reader allowed novellas to make a big comeback.
There's also some variance by genre: crime novels tend to be shorter than science fiction, and romantic novels are shorter still. Young adult books are shorter, too... but if you aim to tell a good story with a beginning, a middle and an end in sixty or sixty-five thousand words, once edited, you've probably met Average Joe's expectations.
Sugar and Spiiice – TG Fiction by Bryony Marsh
On the One Side...
...there's Maddy Bell's method: write 40 chapters and publish.
On the other, we have my suggestion to Ellen Hayes when she was considering dividing the Tuck saga into books. (It's probably still on the Tuckerspawn site, though I haven't been there in years.) That was to ignore lengths and just consider plot arcs or great stopping points, and if one volume comes out more than twice as long as another, don't worry about it. I don't think Ellen (or much of anyone else) liked that, and of course if you're dealing with paper as opposed to electronics there are practical concerns.
I'm guessing that neither of those thoughts help you at all...
Eric
-- Reason I bothered to post something this useless is that the "more like this" section at the bottom of the page opened with a blog entry you posted in 2019 called "Artificial Intelligence and Some Questions For Y'All" (here) that I really enjoyed reading again here in 2024 -- a real high-level discussion. The starting point was a story you were working on called NeverWorld. I was wondering whether anything came of it.
Thanks. You know I always
Thanks. You know I always enjoy hearing from you.
NeverWorld - I still think it’s a good idea for a novel, but I wasn’t sure which subplots were worth continuing.
As my name
Has been mentioned I thought I’d drop my two pen’ath on the subject.
The 40 chapter thing with the Gaby series was pretty much an accident, it was a convenient break point in the saga and a word count that was manageable for publication. Not every volume is 40 chapters but the word count is typically between 80 & 100k which is similar to novels in the book shops.
The Nena series are shorter, about 30 chapters which better suits those tales, other ‘series’ use different chapter counts.
Chapters should be used to tell the story in bite sized chunks, 3k words is, for me the top end size, longer than that probably means I won’t get through it in one go ( as an aside it’s also a convenient length for online posts as most people will read it in one go)
My English teacher was pragmatic about the ‘rules’, whilst grammar and punctuation should be adhered to and maintained, format can be played with. So the ‘rules’ say a paragraph should be three sentences long, it doesn’t proscribe sentence length. And sometimes we might bend that to be more or less as appropriate. They should be bite sized chunks of information.
And then there is the whole story/speech conundrum, text heavy books are hard going, while speech heavy can often end up repetitive just to tell the tale. Some people use conversations to pad things out to get to a word count, it’s obvious and unnecessary, f it doesn’t move the story along, much like pointless descriptions of clothing, tech, locations etc, why is it there?
So how long is a novel? As long as the story takes, don’t get fixated by definitions, it’ll be what it is when you reach the end, just decide whether it’s part of a longer ‘saga’ or a stand alone work, the former can have a more open ending, the latter should have closure of all the story threads. But that’s another rule and rules can be broken right?
Madeline Anafrid Bell