So, I’m coming up to about 25,000 words, and I’m starting to get worried that I’m not as far in the storyline as I should be for this time. I’m not all that sure what to do. How long is a normal novel? Is there a length in particular that I should aim for? How do I know if the story is progressing as it should?
I figure (as with everything) that I’ll just write it and cut out all the unecessary stuff after I’m finished. But I do want to know what I’m aiming for right now. There is SO much stuff that I want to have happen in this story, and I hope I’m not at page 150 or something by now.
And I fell asleep like five times trying to write this. Good freaking night!
Meh, don’t worry about word count as you write your first draft. Cursed Cure, in its first rough draft, barely hit 40,000. (I’m the opposite of you. I write so concisely that I have to add a bunch of stuff to make things make sense 😛 ) Cursed Cure is now hovering around 100,000 and is going up as we speak, probably going to hit 115,000 by the end.
So really, don’t sweat the word count at all.
But, FYI, 60,000 words is considered the cut off for a novel from a novella/short story. Off the top of my head, I believe science fiction books are commonly between 75 to 90 thousand and fantasy books are commonly longer, ranging from 90 to 120 thousand. Books longer than 150,000 words or so tend to make editors/agents pale and look for scissors.
Seriously, though, don’t sweat the word count. Finish the thing before you even begin to worry about its length, cause rewrites can have some huge effects (more than doubled Cursed Cure’s word count, after all).
And how do I make paragraphs in these comments???
See, I make a break, but it just squishes them all together and erases my breaks. *pouts* It’s ruining my style.
Testing: does this work? or perhaps
Did that work?
Ah ha!
This is the secret!
sorry for spamming your comments section. Feel free to delete the last two. Thanks
Oh no! It didn’t work after all. Sadness. I do not know the secret. Tis a very sad day.
Aneeka was right in her comments, both in typical word length and to not sweat the small stuff. Cutting a story down from being overly long is easier than trying to fill it up. Once you’ve got the first draft done, you’ll be able to look at the overall pacing and figure out if you’re doing it right. That’s much easier than trying to figure out the pacing while you’re in the trenches of actually writing.
Whatever you do, you don’t want past pacing to ruin the pacing of what you have left to write. (e.g. speeding up the rest of the story if you spent too long introducing the world)