Words, Words, Words!

How long should your novel be?

In act two, scene two of Hamlet, when the bumbling lord chamberlain Polonius comes across Hamlet reading a book and asks what he is reading, Hamlet replies, ‘words, words, words,’ suggesting his reading matter is just endless symbols on a page. In some ways that is true – most texts are made up of words, and sometimes those words can be tedious or even meaningless. Yet at other times, we are so engrossed in a story that the appearance of the text on the page is irrelevant.

I have just finished the wonderful novel ‘People Like Us’ by Louise Fein. I was lucky enough to be sent an advanced reader copy, but do order it if you get the chance – it comes out in May. When Louise told me her story was around 130,000 words long, I was surprised. I was so invested in her beautiful tale of a Jewish boy and a German girl falling in love in the late 1930’s, that I had no idea whether the novel was long or short. It didn’t matter – in fact I wanted it to go on and on. That’s what good literature does – it transports us away from the page and into the world the writer has conjured. The story takes up as many words as it needs to, and not one of Louise’s words felt extraneous.

Yet, I am always amazed when I remind myself that F.Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ is only 45,000 words long (although I suspect the students I teach it to are very grateful for that!). The text is so rich, and the story so complex, it feels much longer. But again, it is as long as it needs to be.

In truth, when the novel is well written, length doesn’t matter. We are too swept away by beautiful prose to consider the number of words. A badly written novel can be too long at 20,000 words, a brilliant book like ‘War and Peace’ holds our interest for nearly 600,00 words!

My publishers asked me to write around 100,000 words for my second novel, ‘The Child on Platform One,’ in order to be a similar length to my first (‘The Oceans Between Us’). Over the summer of 2018, I set myself the task of writing 2,000 words a day in order to meet my deadline. I remember one day, when I was writing a scene set in a science laboratory and the words didn’t want to flow, I just typed out random scientific terms (test tube, Bunsen burner, conical flask) in order to achieve my quota. I wonder what Hamlet would have made of that! (I hasten to add the words have now been absorbed into a hopefully coherent whole!)

It might be helpful here to list suggested words counts for different types of novels (only a guide!)

General Fiction

Flash Fiction: 300–1500 words

Short Story: 1500–30,000 words

Novellas: 30,000–50,000 words

Novels: 50,000–110,000 words

Fiction: Genres:

Mainstream Romance: 70,000–100,000 words

Subgenre Romance: 40,000–100,000 words

Science Fiction / Fantasy: 90,000–120,000 (and sometimes 150,000) words

Historical Fiction: 80,000–150,000

Thrillers / Horror / Mysteries / Crime: 70,000–90,000 words

Young Adult: 50,000–80,000

Children’s Books Picture Books: 300–800 words

Early Readers: 200–3500 words

Chapter Books: 4000–10,000 words

Middle Grade: 25,000–40,000 words

Nonfiction

Standard Nonfiction (Business, Political Science, Psychology, History, etc.): 70,000–80,000 words Memoir: 80,000–100,000 words

Biography: 80,000–200,000 words

How-to / Self-Help: 40,000–50,000 words

(source: the writelife.com)