Story Length and You
One of the things I get asked about, on a semi-regular basis (relatively speaking), is about the length of the works I write. Most often, this comes in the form of the following conversation:
Potential Reader: Oh, you wrote a book? How long is it?
Rikoshi: Around 120,000 words.
Potential Reader: Oh. ...How many pages is that?
Actually, that's one thing to note right off the bat: we writers almost never deal with page count when gauging story length, for the simple reason that it's an all-but-meaningless measurement, when it comes down to it. The number of pages a story takes up has way more to do with the font size, the margin settings, and all the other layout factors than it has to do with actual story density. What takes up 185 pages in Microsoft Word might well take up 300 pages when bound in paperback.
It's the number of words, though, that really let you judge how long a story is (and, sometimes even more importantly, that let you judge how much progress you're making when you're writing a story; pages full of dialogue are made up of far fewer words than pages full of dense prose). This is a more immutable way of measuring things, and it's for that reason that in writer-to-writer or writer-to-agent or writer-to-editor discussions, that it's the measurement of choice.
kyellgold and I have had this weird bit of synchronicity where both of us tend to write novels that end up at around 120,000 words. Seriously, it's almost a bit eerie how that's where the word count just tends to end up. (Okay, so I realize that I've only published one novel, but that one was almost exactly 120,000 words, and my first draft of The Seventh Chakra is the same length.) And really, that just kind of feels like a "proper" length for a novel, neither too long nor too short, nice and tidy.
So, when my fellow writer-fox posted a link to this blog entry from a literary agent about manuscript length, I was really quite surprised to see that 120K is considered very much on the long side of novel length.
I actually find that kind of hard to believe, on the surface, and that was my knee-jerk reaction. Someone posted (down in the comments) with some word counts for literary classics that helped smooth things out in my mind a bit more (wherein 120K doesn't seem too far off the mark). Though I am amused to think that Thousand Leaves is a full four times longer than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Obviously, it's a fallacy to think that "longer means better" in any case when it comes to writing. Actually, one of the biggest problems I run into when writing short stories is that they tend to approach novella length, and novellas are kind of the ugly duckling of the writing world: I personally tend to think they're great, in terms of something that's a great length to read, but they're too long to fit into short story anthologies, but too short to publish on their own. Last year, I worked really hard on trying to write short, succinct stories, and I had a lot of fun (and I hope, some success) with that.
There's also the sneaking suspicion I have that my final draft of The Seventh Chakra will end up being even longer than 120K by the time it's done. I may have mentioned it before, but my initial draft of Thousand Leaves was only 95K, and it still turned out being 120K after I pulled entire huge sections of it out. Then again, Chakra is a much more straightforward (or at least less, uh, 'sprawly') a story, so perhaps the overall length won't fluctuate as much as I edit and rewrite it.
On another note entirely, there's another post over at fangs_fur_fey about being sadistic to your characters in your writing. I found it amusing, and, perhaps more to the point, fitting as it applies to my own writing style. Bits like this I particularly identify with:
Because although I love my characters dearly, I have to say, I also love to hurt them. I love to take away the stuff they need and the people they love and shove them outside their comfort zone without so much as a windbreaker. I like to make them uncomfortable, humiliate them, gun down their loved ones in cold blood, and give them pasts that will haunt them forever.
Sometimes this is a bit more literal than some people might like, but hey, it pays the bills*.
But yeah, that's another thing people have asked me about a lot, in the past: "How come you have bad things happen to nice people when they haven't done anything wrong?" Well, because otherwise, it wouldn't really be much of a story, now, would it? It's all about watching the best come out of people as they strive against adversity, and not so much just about getting off on watching characters suffer.
*It doesn't, actually. Not at all.
Potential Reader: Oh, you wrote a book? How long is it?
Rikoshi: Around 120,000 words.
Potential Reader: Oh. ...How many pages is that?
Actually, that's one thing to note right off the bat: we writers almost never deal with page count when gauging story length, for the simple reason that it's an all-but-meaningless measurement, when it comes down to it. The number of pages a story takes up has way more to do with the font size, the margin settings, and all the other layout factors than it has to do with actual story density. What takes up 185 pages in Microsoft Word might well take up 300 pages when bound in paperback.
It's the number of words, though, that really let you judge how long a story is (and, sometimes even more importantly, that let you judge how much progress you're making when you're writing a story; pages full of dialogue are made up of far fewer words than pages full of dense prose). This is a more immutable way of measuring things, and it's for that reason that in writer-to-writer or writer-to-agent or writer-to-editor discussions, that it's the measurement of choice.
kyellgold and I have had this weird bit of synchronicity where both of us tend to write novels that end up at around 120,000 words. Seriously, it's almost a bit eerie how that's where the word count just tends to end up. (Okay, so I realize that I've only published one novel, but that one was almost exactly 120,000 words, and my first draft of The Seventh Chakra is the same length.) And really, that just kind of feels like a "proper" length for a novel, neither too long nor too short, nice and tidy.
So, when my fellow writer-fox posted a link to this blog entry from a literary agent about manuscript length, I was really quite surprised to see that 120K is considered very much on the long side of novel length.
I actually find that kind of hard to believe, on the surface, and that was my knee-jerk reaction. Someone posted (down in the comments) with some word counts for literary classics that helped smooth things out in my mind a bit more (wherein 120K doesn't seem too far off the mark). Though I am amused to think that Thousand Leaves is a full four times longer than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Obviously, it's a fallacy to think that "longer means better" in any case when it comes to writing. Actually, one of the biggest problems I run into when writing short stories is that they tend to approach novella length, and novellas are kind of the ugly duckling of the writing world: I personally tend to think they're great, in terms of something that's a great length to read, but they're too long to fit into short story anthologies, but too short to publish on their own. Last year, I worked really hard on trying to write short, succinct stories, and I had a lot of fun (and I hope, some success) with that.
There's also the sneaking suspicion I have that my final draft of The Seventh Chakra will end up being even longer than 120K by the time it's done. I may have mentioned it before, but my initial draft of Thousand Leaves was only 95K, and it still turned out being 120K after I pulled entire huge sections of it out. Then again, Chakra is a much more straightforward (or at least less, uh, 'sprawly') a story, so perhaps the overall length won't fluctuate as much as I edit and rewrite it.
On another note entirely, there's another post over at fangs_fur_fey about being sadistic to your characters in your writing. I found it amusing, and, perhaps more to the point, fitting as it applies to my own writing style. Bits like this I particularly identify with:
Because although I love my characters dearly, I have to say, I also love to hurt them. I love to take away the stuff they need and the people they love and shove them outside their comfort zone without so much as a windbreaker. I like to make them uncomfortable, humiliate them, gun down their loved ones in cold blood, and give them pasts that will haunt them forever.
Sometimes this is a bit more literal than some people might like, but hey, it pays the bills*.
But yeah, that's another thing people have asked me about a lot, in the past: "How come you have bad things happen to nice people when they haven't done anything wrong?" Well, because otherwise, it wouldn't really be much of a story, now, would it? It's all about watching the best come out of people as they strive against adversity, and not so much just about getting off on watching characters suffer.
*It doesn't, actually. Not at all.