How long is a novel?
You’ve started writing (I hope) so when do you stop? This isn’t such a dumb question as it sounds. Before I discuss it, I need to finesse something I wrote last time. I was encouraging you to write every day, even if you think it’s complete and utter rubbish. I stand by that but there really are some days when life takes over and you really can’t find the time for one single word. That’s okay because deep in your unconscious the ideas are still churning around. Just keep that notebook handy in case any of them pop into your head.
The reason I’ve mentioned this now is that I looked back over the last few weeks, a time when I’ve been writing the sequel to BAGMAN, and there have been quite a few days when my journal entry tells me that I haven’t managed to get any writing done. So in fairness I thought I should confess that. It really is okay to miss a day or two but much longer than that and you might lose whatever flow or momentum you’ve built up. Writing a novel is a marathon, so getting into a rhythm with it really helps.
Right, now we’ve got that over with, back to the question of the day: ‘How long is a novel?’ Wikipedia tells us that a novella is generally 17,500 to 40,000 words long. They’ve based this on information collected from writing competitions. So…anything less than that is going into short story territory and anything longer than 40,000 words is a novel. I guess. If you Google the question, the top answer is that a novel is around 80,000 words long. I think it actually says that the word-count is 80,000 – 100,000. That’s quite a big jump from only 40k. So my first observation is that your novel is pretty much as long as you want it to be – or the story demands – as long as it’s more than the length of a novella.
When I was first pondering all this, I remembered that one of my favourite novels was really pretty short. I’m talking about ‘Hotel du Lac’ by the late and great Anita Brookner. It won the Booker Prize in 1984 and was subsequently very well adapted for television by Christopher Hampton. The novel worked brilliantly as a TV film because it was so short that hardly anything needed to be cut or artificially condensed. As the book had also won such a high accolade, I thought that it was a good model for me to follow. But how many words was it? I still don’t know; I’ve not counted every one of them. But I have counted a couple of ‘normal’ pages and then multiplied by the total number and this gives us around 36,000 words. As a result, every time I break though the 36k barrier, I give a little cheer and congratulate myself on the fact that I now have something as long as a Booker Prize winning novel. Anything longer and it’s a bonus – as would be the Booker Prize, of course.
Talking of which, I’m actually perfectly happy if whatever paltry efforts I produce are only read by friends and relatives – but if you’re really serious about this and you’re thinking of a new career or at least an income-stream, you’ll need to think about the next stage and the next big question: do you need an agent? More of this next time.
Happy writing – even if you’re not actually doing it every single day!