Word Counts – how long should a novel be?

A few years ago I went with some of my creative writing students to a talk given by a literary agent. At the end someone in the audience asked her how long a novel should be.

“Ninety thousand words,” she said.

Someone else raised their hand. “Mine’s one hundred and three thousand and-”

The agent shook her head. “Ninety thousand.”

Another hand went up. “Mine’s eighty-seven thousand and-”

“-Ninety thousand.”

At the time I thought she was being a little unbending. Surely every story can’t come out at exactly 90k words? (According to the rather pessimistically entitled website, Lit Rejections,  different genres have different expectations – there’s a full breakdown here ).

But what I have learned in the intervening years is that whilst the novel may get away with a +/- 10%, the structure doesn’t.

If a novel is going to be 90k words, then the first act, which is 25% of the novel has to be 22500, the second act, being the longest at 50%, 45,000 words, and the third act another 22 500.

When I’d finished writing The Runaway, and because I like a good spreadsheet, I did a word count of each act, mainly for my own amusement. I knew the first act was 488 words too long, the second act was almost bang on (60 words over), but the third act was missing about 5000.  (I always find endings difficult.)

I sent it to my agent. He’s never mentioned word counts to me and I’m fairly confident he’s not going to start spreadsheeting my novels. The entire manuscript was over 85 000 words, which is +/- 10% close enough to 90k. Good enough, I thought.

[image error]

Getting someone who knows their stuff involved in my writing process is amazing, because it’s when the whole thing starts to feel real. I got his feedback and worked my way through his comments – the words changing but not really growing or shrinking in the first or second act.

But when I got to the third, he’d pointed out that there was an important scene missing – a loose end I’d not tied. I wrote the missing scene. It came in at 2 000 words. Took the whole novel to 87k, and the third act to 19 500 – 3 000 words short.

Next it went to my editor at HarperCollins, without any mention of word counts. She rang to give me her first impressions, which were – she loved it.

Hurrah.

But… she thought the ending was a bit rushed.

Guess how long the final act was by the time it went to print…