Word Count and Writers’ Conceit

If you know a writer who proudly tells you all about the massive word count of his latest creation, you are talking to an amateur.

Words, in and of themselves, are not valuable. They only matter when A) you are being paid by the word; or B) your contract stipulates a minimum word count, a maximum word count, or both. Most of the time, a working writer spends his days struggling to meet word count, but there are times when you realize you’ve got to cut to stay under the maximum. On the whole, it’s better to be over than under. A book that is bloated can always be edited, but a even a great editor cannot manufacture five or ten thousand words that you failed to supply.

Have you ever read A Tale of Two Cities? The book is sold in an edited version for consumption by high school students. That’s because the book was initially published as a serial over 31 parts. It’s incredibly verbose because Dickens was earning money on each installment. (It’s a popular myth that he was paid by the word, but the story sure reads like he was.) It’s a great book, but without doubt it includes a great deal of prose that lends nothing to the story. You may own a leather-bound first edition that is absolutely beautiful to look at, but all those gilded affectations don’t make the novel any better.

Writing simply to hear yourself talk isn’t a virtue. I once had the misfortune of editing the work of a would-be fantasy author whose novel plumbed new depths of terrible writing. This book quite literally reset my bar much lower for what I thought the worst writing possible could be, and I’ve read — and edited — some real stinkers. The same author was very proud of the 1.5 million words over multiple novels that he had squeezed out over the last several years. How anyone could write that much and not actually get better was less terrifying than the thought that he had improved over that time. Regardless, said author would tell anyone who’d listen just how many words he had typed, believing this to mean he must be good at writing.

This is one of the reasons editors are so important. Left to our own devices, authors tend to be self-indulgent and pretentious. It takes the lens of an outside eye to filter out our worse conceits, and bloated word count is one of these. Here are my basic guidelines for word count:

1,000 words to 1,500 words: flash fiction
2,000 words to 7,000 words: short story
10,000 words to 18,000 words, give or take: really, really long short story
20,000 words to 40,000 words: novella
50,000 words to 60,000 words: a full-length novel, but a relatively quick read
85,000 words to 95,000 words: The maximum length you should tolerate for a full-length novel
100,000 words and over: You had better be George R.R. Martin.

These are just general guidelines. It’s not like you haven’t written something approaching a novella at 17,000 words; it’s just that there are some overlaps in the categories. When I write a novella for Amazon publication, I try to come in at a minimum of 20,000 words, just to make the product worthwhile. To me, a novel isn’t “full length” until it hits at least 50,000 words. All of my Executioner novels for Harlequin were in the 55,000 to 58,000 word range, while the longer “Stony Man” and “Super Bolan” titles were more like 85,000 to 88,000 when I turned them in.

You should never let a book grow to over 100,000 words, in my opinion. Unless you’re scripting an epic fantasy novel, a 100,000 word novel is just an indulgence that will likely be ponderous and boring. If a story can’t be contained within less than 100,000 words, you’ve got too much plot or you should be working on a trilogy.  More than likely, though, it isn’t that you have more plot points than the word count will bear; it’s that your prose is bloated and boring. That means you’re going to lose the reader’s interest.

Never, ever proclaim the word count of your latest project as if that means something in and of itself. Blogging updates like, “Dear Diary, today I passed 103,000 words in my self-published Amazon Kindle fantasy book that nobody will read” just underscores that you don’t know what you’re doing. If anything, you should be making apologies for a book that gets away from you like that.

There’s a reason writers like Hemingway, Robert E. Howard, and Moorcock are known for the sparseness of their prose (in comparison to writers like H.P. Lovecraft, who once wrote a sentence so long nobody has yet finished reading it). They were great writers because they said a lot with very few words. That’s the ideal for which you should be shooting. Yes, H.P. Lovecraft was also a great writer, but as difficult as it is to be brief and great, it’s even harder to be verbose and great.

Remember that writing, good writing, isn’t only about you. It’s also about the audience. Who are they? Who do you want them to be? And what does the audience want? The shift to e-readers means that, at least if you’re publishing for electronic format, you need to keep word counts lower. If you must write your magnum opus, bear in mind that you are cutting your potential audience before you even get started. To write for the people who read your work is not somehow compromising your vision for your book — but it may mean you don’t get to be as self-indulgent while you type.