A Question of Length

Length of a novel is probably the most difficult thing for a writer to consider when they are first starting out. This is a message repeated over and over again by some of my favorite authors. Length matters, and is almost impossible to pin down. Michelle West, my all-time favorite author, once projected the Sun Sword series to be a trilogy (and it ended up with six books). Kate Elliott, a writer I respect, made a similar misjudgment with her Crown of Swords series, projecting it to be a trilogy and ending up with SEVEN. George R. R. Martin envisioned A Song of Ice and Fire as a trilogy, too, at one point, and we're now awaiting the release of Book 5.

If you wanna see where this is going, read below. If not, okay.




I used all of these examples to say that when a story is just in the realm of your mind, it might seem nice and short or it might seem light a HUGE monster to wrestle with. This is how Shadow Lands seemed to me at the beginning, and I put a (for me) ambitious word count on it: 160k. Part of the hugeness of the story, for me, was in just NOT KNOWING what was going to be happening in some of the middle segments, but after a lot of time and a lot of questions from others and from myself, I think I've figured out those gray areas, for the most part. And in figuring things out, I think I can manage to make the story a bit more tight than it would have been before. By this I mean that I'm confident that I can reach the end of the story in about 130-140k, 20-30k shorter than it was going to be originally. I could turn out to be wrong, and this could still be a lengthy tome, but my hope is that it is a much more manageable one!

Oh, and tonight's word count coming later on. More work to be done.