[Image: “Doodle with Measuring Tape,” by Bryan Reyna]
I came across an interesting site this morning, called Renaissance Learning (subtitle: “Advanced Technology for Data-Driven Schools.” In general, Renaissance Learning is a resource for (as you might guess) teachers and other educators. One area of the site, the Quiz Store, peddles quizzes about specific books. What interests me today about the site — and may interest others among you who are also writing books — is one particular page at the Quiz Store, the “advanced search” page.Here’s why this page interests me even though I’m not in the market for a literary quiz: when you do a book or author search, among the information you can easily learn is the number of words in the book.
Traditionally, the answer to the question, How many words should my book be? is It depends on your book’s genre. Then the answerer goes on to spell out, for each genre of interest, a range of word counts — 70-80K words for Genre X, up to 125K words for Y, and so on.
And yes, I know — this all probably sounds like so much foofaraw to those of you who aren’t writing for publication, or are writing to self-publish. You’re thinking: Just write the damn book, right? It takes as many words as it takes, period. Alas, neither the real world of publishing nor the minds of most writers work that way.
The problem with these guidelines, it seems to me, is two-fold: (a) they’re only rough guides (the recommendations always say things like, “Of course, there are plenty of exceptions!”); and (b) they presuppose that your definition of your own book’s genre will match the definition of the genre as used by whoever’s supplied the word counts in the first place. A more common-sensical approach, I think, is just to come up with a list of books and/or authors you like, vaguely “like” your book (and/or you) in terms of desired readership, career aspirations, and so on. How many words were in those books, as published?
The Renaissance Learning site doesn’t include statistics for every author, let alone book, ever published. But I think it includes enough to be instructive to curious writers (and readers!).
Here are nineteen examples from my own checking this morning (fiction only):
- Truman Capote: In Cold Blood, 121890 words
- Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair, 100772 words
- William Gibson: Pattern Recognition, 98612 words
- Neil Gaiman: American Gods, 183222 words; Anansi Boys, 107972 words; Neverwhere, 98021 words
- T.C. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain, 129038 words
- Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants, 100483 words
- Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 216020 words; The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, 126808 words
- Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, 308931 words (!)
- Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife, 155717 words
- John Irving: The Hotel New Hampshire, 168551 words; The World According to Garp, 194873 words; A Prayer for Owen Meany, 236061 words
- Ian McEwan: Atonement, 123378 words
- Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash, 160371 words
- J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 77508 words; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 198227 words
(The average of all the above, by the way, is about 153K words.)
Of course, all of this still “depends.” In particular, it depends on variables such as the author’s publishing history: like office workers, authors who’ve been successful early in their careers are often given roomier cubicles in their later ones. And it depends, yes, on the genres to which their publisher assigns their work.Caveats aside, it also answers the question: What’s the ideal length of the kind of book I myself like to read? Because it’s a pretty good bet, I think, that if you like to read certain kinds of successful books by certain successful authors, and the length of a book you’ve written is about the same as those books’, then whatever else you’re freaking out about, you shouldn’t be freaking out about your book’s word count.
The Querulous Squirrel says
On the contrary, if you are going to freak out for freaking out’s sake, word count is as good or better a subject as any. It’s extremely concrete and there’s an answer.
John says
Ah, but Squirrel — the operative phrase there is “for freaking out’s sake.” I’m trying to practice not freaking out at all. Even inwardly!
Of course, what am I doing even talking about word counts with a doyenne of micro-Ficciones?!?
Froog says
I have quite a strong gut feeling about this question, without referring to representative examples like these; although I think these bear me out pretty well.
The ideal length of a novel is 120,000 words (plus or minus about 20,000). [And I don’t think it is genre-dependent. It’s just that ‘fantasy’ has established a fashion for itself of being self-indulgently overlong, and its nerdy fanbase has come to accept, and even to expect this. But even fantasy novels would actually be better if they observed this sort of word limit.]
I think there has been a tendency in recent years towards slightly shorter novels, in the 80,000 to 100,000 range, and that may be a good thing: more sharply focused stories rather than rambling potboilers, and sparer writing. However, once you get down to around 80,000 words, it starts to feel like an uncomfortably ‘short novel’, and – unless perhaps it’s a children’s book – the reader is likely to feel a little shortchanged (even if the price of the book was lower). Once you get down to 60,000 or 50,000 words, that’s ‘novella’ territory; and it may need to be packaged with a few short stories in order to be marketable.
150,000 to 160,000 is a long novel, and needs a big story to fill it. 180,000 words is a very long novel, and is rarely justified. Unless it has a huge sweep – dozens of characters, decades long timeframe – it’s probably not going to sustain reader interest. And even if it does, it always tends to feel a bit self-indulgent to me. And you can’t help thinking, Couldn’t they have CUT this into two books? [Interesting sub-point here. Long books usually cost more, partly reflecting the cost of the paper in them, as well as the ‘added value’ to the reader of a longer story. I also wonder if part of the reluctance of publishers to divide long books into smaller ones may be down to some economy of scale: is one VERY big book cheaper to produce than two big books? (I suspect it’s more about marketing expenses, and doubts as to whether a divided book, especially the second instalment, will sell as well as a single volume.) In that case, the shift to Kindle might produce longer books at lower prices. Kindle may also perhaps reduce the offputting effect of a very long book. Most people are daunted by long books, but it’s the visual impact of seeing that it takes up 2 or 3 inches of your shelf-space, and the physical impact of feeling how much weight it adds to your bag that really brings that home to you. Seeing a wordcount or a ‘pagecount’ when you download a digital copy lacks that sensory punch.]
Fantastic writer though John Irving is, I feel his success has freed him from the sensible restraint of his editors, and he’s writing for the sake of writing – because he enjoys it so much – rather than to make a book with a finely honed form. I am put off attempting his longer ones, because they are so dauntingly huge, I know I’d probably lose interest – or momentum, at any rate – half-way through and never finish them. I have heard that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is fantastic, but I’d never dare to pick it up; it might break my wrist. Well, I honestly think I might consider taking a pair of scissors to it, and cutting it into two or three pieces to make it physically more manageable and psychologically less intimidating; that’s the only way I can ever imagine reading it.
However much wonderful writing there is in Irving and Susanna Clarke, I am pretty sure that their books would be greatly improved – certainly enhanced in their appeal and accessibility to readers, but also, I think, in absolute terms, made better books – if they were trimmed by 20 or 30% (or, in Clarke’s case, maybe as much as 40% or 50%). There must be a lot of description and incident in these books that is ‘fine writing’ for its own sake, not really advancing the plot. It might be very enjoyable when considered in isolation, but in the context of the whole book this kind of thing is exposed as otiose and soon becomes tedious.
100,000 to 150,000 is the range; 120,000 is the golden mean.
John says
Thanks so much for chiming in on this.
It’s almost uncanny how many reference resources talk about the ideal length — the target to be “written to” — as 70-80,000 words. When I did this little experiment with the Renaissance Learning database, I fully expected confirmation of that number (at least in the ballpark).
Now, that the experiment did not confirm the conventional-wisdom word count doesn’t prove anything. Other, not necessarily mutually-exclusive interpretations: (1) I just prefer longer books to shorter ones. (2) The books I queried the RenLearn database for, but failed to find, would have tipped the average word count downwards. (3) The sort of book I think Seems to Fit most “resembles” just happens to be longer, on average, than the sorts of books discussed in all those other venues. (4) The RenLearn database includes only as published word counts — maybe the as written figures were very much higher, and the manuscripts got whittled way down (or split into multi-book series) in the editing… which would confirm the short-is-good theory. (5+) Etc., etc., etc.
Still, the not-even-close disparity surprised me very much. (And you may have heard the “Whew!” even where you are, borne on the wind.)
I’ve wondered about the potential effects of e-publishing on average word counts, too. One factor to consider there is the extent to which e-publishing overlaps self-publishing: without an editor to say, like, “Whoa — put the brakes on there, partner!” many authors may just get sloppy about what READERS prefer. Taking e-books as a whole, if that’s true, we could probably expect the average to climb northwards of 150K, irrespective of genre or any other consideration.
Froog says
Interesting that the current wisdom seems to be for rather shorter books than my gut instinct advocates. But then, I grew up on the 19th century classics, so I guess that ramped my pain threshold up a little.
I loved that O’Connell article about the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’; but before reading it, I had assumed it was going to be about the way characters take their authors hostage and, after long confinement together, begin to inspire a love they don’t deserve – undiscriminating, uncritical.
I have a follow-up theory on the ‘ideal length’, on why it’s such a powerful notion for me. I’m a moderately slow reader: I can’t sustain a rate of more than about 10,000 words per hour. And that’s in a concentrated hour of reading. I seldom actually manage that; I’m always losing track of some important detail and wanting to backtrack; or rereading a great passage just to savour it; or lapsing into a reverie of visual imagination, creating scenes in my head; or pondering, analysing, wondering if I would have written it that way, wondering how it might be adapted for the screen; or just lapsing into restful state of ‘no thought’ while I subconsciously digest what I’ve just consumed. I’d guess I rarely manage more than about 40 minutes of intensive reading for every hour or so I spend in front of an open book. And, when I’m working, it’s difficult to find the time or the energy to devote even an hour a day to reading (particularly now that I do so much reading – and writing – online). Most of my reading, in fact, gets done on holidays – when I can readily set aside 3 or 4 hours a day or more to reading a book.
But when I’m trying to read during my ‘normal’ life, an hour a day or so is probably it: 10,000 words a day at the very most; perhaps only half of that on average.
And the thing is: I don’t want to spend more than 2 or 3 weeks reading one book. I’ll lose interest, I’ll lose momentum, I’ll lose my place. Or, more importantly, my memory will fade of what happened early on in the book. I think it’s difficult, if not impossible, to hold the whole of a book in your mind – or all of its most salient details, anyway – for much more than a few weeks… if it’s much more than 100,000 or 120,000 words long.
Enthusiasts of the seriously long book may say that they like the sense of getting ‘lost’ in a book, and that they feel satisfied to have reached the end of an arduous journey, regardless of whether they can remember that much of how they started out or what happened along the way. I don’t feel like that.
And I’m probably getting even more resistant to the idea, even more wary of the very long novel, in my middle years, as my memory starts to crumble. I don’t think I have the physical stamina or the mental resource any more to take on a War and Peace. Or a Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
marta says
Okay. Where to start?
Outside of NaNoWriMo, I try not to worry about word count–I’m definitely of the it-depends school.
I’m currently reading The Eyre Affair and the word count seems reasonable so far.
I have read Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I love that book. I don’t know why cutting it would make it better. But I’m crazy. I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings as three books. My copy is one VERY big book. But I don’t treat my wrists with the greatest respect.
Don’t plan on writing anything that big though.
It’s good to have a guideline, but silly to pad a book to reach a word count and sad to cut great things to whittle down.
John says
You’re reading The Eyre Affair??? Yay! Er, uh… I mean, do you like it so far? (I just started the latest Thursday Next book — One of Our Thursdays Is Missing — last week.)
The most obvious answer to the “How long should a novel be?” — I think — is, “Long enough to tell the story completely, and no longer.” This begs the question; it takes for granted that “the story” is a set thing — that we’d all agree where and when “the story” begins and ends, and all agree how much backstory it contains, and so on. But that’s not true. An author decides, more or less arbitrarily, to begin here and end there… yet “the story,” if you want to get weirdly philosophic about it, could in theory be said to include anything that ever happens (or has happened, or will happen) in its fictional universe.
But I’m not that weirdly philosophic. I hope.
Jayne says
Oh Lordy, if I have to worry about word count I will never get to that novel. This is why I do not venture to look at any set rules with regards to publishing. I need to write it first!
I’m definitely going to snoop around Renaissance, though. Thanks for the link. ;)
John says
Only “worry” about word count after it’s done, I say. (Or any of those other set rules, for that matter.) Then you can bring yourself up short by realizing, like, Wait — if it’s DONE, then it doesn’t make any difference how many words it is!
marta says
Came across this essay and thought of this post.
http://www.themillions.com/2011/05/the-stockholm-syndrome-theory-of-long-novels.html
John says
I loved the “Stockholm syndrome” theory. Thanks so much for that link!