The short of it: When the book runs too short

Anne Allen has a post up about when your book runs too short or too long. 

I have a long history of books running too short.  In fact, it was very discouraging and frustrating for me.  Publishers would require something like 80K-90K, and I was hitting at 40-50K.

The craft books were no help.  They always assumed you were writing over.  I couldn’t even see how someone could write a book that ballooned up to 200K.  By the time I hit 50K, I was scratching at whatever I could to get the word count up—often at the expense of the story.

And when I asked for help, I got “Just add a subplot!” like that was a magic fix.   No one seemed to get that the story was 40K short.  You can’t add a 40K subplot without the reader rebelling.  Most of the other tips I ran across would have added maybe 10K.  Certainly not 40K.

At the time, I eked my way up to 80K, watching the word count like I was on surveillance.  It was also a frustrating experience because when I revised, some things come out and others go in.  I might take out 500 words and add 600 words, so the word count would stay the same.

And the novel was a complete mess. Between trying to get to the word count and outlining advice sneaking it, it was a plane crash that took a whole city.  Just really bad.

It was so bad and I was so frustrated that I wondered if I could ever write a novel length work.  I was ready to give up.  But I took Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel.  There was a lesson in there where you identify everything wrong in the book, and all those places where I’d added for word count jumped out at me.  I lost half the book.

Back to square one.

It does have a happy ending.  I tossed the entire book, started again without that baggage from word counts and outlines.  Rogue God was the result of that.

In hindsight, I think one of the reasons I had so much trouble with word count is that I have a natural sense of where the story should end, and it tended to fall right around the 40-50K area.  One of the reasons I went over to indie is so I don’t have to worry about word count.  I can just tell the story I want to tell.

Filed under: Writing Tagged: word count