Tag: story structure

Normally, when I have a conversation with someone about story length, it's because the writer has written an opus that needs to be trimmed down. This is often the result of too much backstory or unnecessary word building and character description that only distracts from the story as a whole. Trimming a story down is where I'm the queen. (Okay, I'll admit it... I overwrite my own stories in early drafts. I've developed the skills and techniques needed to trim word counts quickly, bringing a story back in line with where it should be.)

However, occasionally, I find myself having a conversation about how a story is actually too short based on the elements presented. There might be too many named characters. Or the setting plays too big of a role for the word real estate available. Or perhaps, there were too many twists and turns and not all the threads were adequately explored.

This is more often seen in shorter story forms, like short stories and novellas, and trying to explain the minimum word count needed to do a story justice is not an easy concept to fathom.

In episode 12.27 of the podcast Writing Excuses, Mary Robinette Kowal introduced an equation that she uses to work out how long a story should be based on the number of characters, number of locations and the number of MICE elements (and NO, I'm not talking about those little things that go squeak, squeak, or those devices that we click repeatedly when the computer refuses to respond). So, let's get to it and break the mathematics down.

So you've gotten into writing this story idea, and the word counts are steadily climbing. You're not even a third of the way through your intended plot, and already you've hit the industry accepted word count for your genre. Before you rush off to turn your manuscript into a trilogy, think this through.

As I've discussed before in the post Length matters, but story matters more,  agents and editors use word counts as a first-level indication of the maturity of the writing. Going dramatically over what is considered to be an acceptable word count length could be a sign of over writing — writing that is filled with too much backstory or unnecessary description. Yet, coming under the word count could be a sign that not enough attention was given to the details — that a story is all tell and no show.

But let's say that you are the most gifted writer on the planet, and that every word in your manuscript has its purpose. (We'll ignore the fact that a professional editor will have different ideas, but we'll carry on.) There is no way that you can do your story proper justice in a single book. Or maybe you set out from the beginning to actually write a series.

The place where a novel finishes is NOT when you hit 100,000 words, but rather when a story plot arc comes to a conclusion. This is where the dreaded synopsis can help in a big way.

Writers who are heading down the traditional publication path are likely about to scream at me. Synopses are scary things — whittling that 80,000+ words into only 500. But that's a submission synopsis. What I'm talking about is an editorial synopsis. 

Every writer that is serious about publishing, particularly those attempting the traditional publication path, will know that agents and editors put a lot of weight on word counts. The acceptable limits vary depending on the age category and genre of the book.

(By the way, Young Adult is NOT a genre. It's an age category. And Fiction is NOT a genre either. You can find more information about the various age categories here. More information about the main genre classifications can be found here.)

It's incredibly important to have a good understanding of the average word counts for the type of story that you are writing, but it's just as important to understand word counts are not an excuse for poor storytelling.