Word-Count Worries
At this stage in the Twelve Rules of Writing we reach the issue of word-count. As it says in the rules:
8. Word-count is important.
Only books with specific numbers of words ever get published. This is why many books never see the light of day. Once a word-count has been used, though, it can’t be re-used, which is why books are different lengths. The exact number of words required is a secret of the industry and is only known by editors and publishers, which is why they are often published authors in their own right, as they know what number comes next.
Try counting the words in recently published books to try and guess the next number in the sequence.
There are a surprising amount of questions about how many words are required in order to increase your chances of publication and there is a lot of misleading advice out there, which is why Rule 8 exists. It’s as if somewhere there is a magic number of words that will appeal to all publishers, agents and editors. So let me be clear: There is no magic number. There are, however, better and worse answers to the question, and that’s what this article is about.
As an initial and purely practical guideline, between 70K (70,000) and 150K words in a good number to aim for in a first novel.
These aren’t hard numbers. 65K might be okay and 160K might also be fine, although once above 150K words you are starting to reach the physical boundaries of a printed paperback. Font sizes may have to be reduced and the binding may require special attention to prevent splitting when you open it. This can increase the unit cost of publication.
1216 pp of George R R Martin
That does not mean that books will not be published outside these boundaries. As an example, my first novel, Sixty-One Nails is 154K words and because of that the font size is very slightly smaller than normal. Genre plays a part - The Eye of the World, the first in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, was 305K words. George R R Martin’s: A Storm of Swords is 404K and runs to over 1,000 pages in paperback. There is even an acronym in the industry, BFF, which stands for Big Fat Fantasy, for exactly this type of book.
Similarly, below 70K words novels start to look a little thin, and the font size and line spacing may increase slightly to give a book a bit more heft. Too much below 60K and the reader starts to feel that they might not be getting their money’s worth, the spine get’s thin and the book vanishes on the shelf when edge on. Below that we’re talking more novella than novel.
167 pp of Paulo Coelho
But once again, there are exceptions. Stephen King’s: Gunslinger, first of The Dark Tower series is 55K words. Paulo Coelho’s: The Alchemist, is about 45K words, which is well into novella size, but they were both successfully published and sold very well indeed. John le Carré’s: The Spy Who Came Into The Cold, and Ian Flemming’s: Casino Royale, both fall into this category as they were published at a time when thinner books were more prevalent.
When a publisher takes on a new writer, they take a risk. There’s a chance that the book won’t sell and they’ll end up crediting the booksellers for all the unsold stock and swallowing the cost of publication and distribution. If the book is more expensive to produce then the consequences of that risk become greater, so publishers can be reluctant to publish a new author’s book if it costs more to produce, especially if there’s a shorter book from another author that’s just as good.
While word-count will not prevent your book from being published, it will have a bearing on the decision an agent or publisher will make. They will look at the risks and the opportunities and make a judgement call. They have to look at their market and decide whether readers will buy what you’ve written for the price they can produce it.
Part of the craft of writing is learning when to cut and when to expand. It’s not a matter of writing to a particular word-count, but rather learning to step back from your work and understand where a thin story needs more meat and a fat story can be pruned to remove distracting detail. The expectations of your audience and the current conventions of the genre are the guide here rather than any arbitrary number.
The trump card is the writing. If you can make your story stand head and shoulders above anything else on offer then the word-count will be irrelevant.
It really is that simple.
Short Stories: Yes or No?
We’re past the half-way mark in the twelve rules of writing, and entering the shady grey area of becoming a writer. As it says in the Twelve Rules of Writing:
7. Start with short stories before graduating to novel-length pieces
There is no point in trying to write a novel before mastering the short story. As John Steinbeck said: ~
“I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances..”
If Mr Steinbeck isn’t ready to write a novel then you certainly aren’t.
That last bit is the key part. What it says is that because someone else – even someone as erudite and literary as John Steinbeck – found the path to becoming a writer through writing short stories, then you must also. Encapsulated in that sentence is the assumption that there is only one way to become a writer.
I have been told to my face that it is impossible to be a published author without a string of short story credits to your name, which is interesting because I had two books in print before I released anything at all in the short form and I do not have a drawer full of short story drafts waiting for daylight.
The response to this? I am the exception that proves the rule. But as we are rapidly discovering , they’re not so much rules, as guidelines.
My choice of Steinbeck’s quote was deliberate, for if you read the advice from John Steinbeck you will find that although he wrote many short stories he never said that this is the only way to become a writer. Indeed, later in the same article he says:
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
~ John Steinbeck: Advice for Beginning Writers
There you have it – there is no recipe, no formula, no path mapped out or way described. The whole point is that you have to find your own way and you have to do it for yourself. So where does the short story advice originate? Why in so many places does it say that you should write short stories before you write a novel?
There is a good reason to write short stories, and it is entirely practical.
It is much harder to criticise your own work than someone else’s. As the author of a piece of writing you are blind to its weaknesses because you created them. If I were to offer a single piece of advice to anyone with ambitions to write it would be this – get involved in critique. Join a critique site, form a writers group, find other people struggling with the same issues and share your writing. Critique theirs and get them to critique yours.
And if you’re going to critique work and have your own work critiqued, you’re going to find that’s much easier with a short story than with a novel. People don’t have time to read 100,000 words for you, particularly if the same mistakes are repeated over and over, which they likely are.
Having short work to review means that time can be spent giving and receiving feedback, helping you to overcome your weaknesses and helping others to mitigate theirs. Yes, you could critique a chapter from the middle of a novel, but you’ll be missing out on anything which relies on an understanding of the whole piece and you’ll be able to use the excuse – “it was just before/after this piece”
And there is a good reason not to write short stories too.
The short story is entirely different in structure and nature to a novel. They have the basics of grammar and punctuation, voice and technique in common, but writing short stories will not teach you how to plan, structure and execute something of novel depth and length. There are things you can do in a novel that are not possible in a short story and to learn how to do those things you will need to practice novel-writing.
Writing short stories will reach you the basics, and the skill of constructing short stories, which is an honourable pursuit in itself. It will allow you to short circuit the long and painful experience of writing a novel only to find out it’s rubbish and you need to start again. However, if you are a novelist, and not a short story writer, then that is what you will have to do. You will write, and re-draft, and write again to perfect your art, because that’s what novelists do.
They write novels.
The Other Five Senses
As part of my continuing series on Writing, this article is about writing for your senses. Here’s a refresher for those who missed the original article.
6. Write for all five senses
Some writers make the mistake of only writing for the visual sense. In order to increase the depth of your writing you need to engage the other senses too, so when you are writing about a particularly romantic sunset, you will need to explain how it smells and tastes, as well as how it looks. If you are writing about a sunset and you don’t know how a sunset tastes, you have already broken rule 1.
It seems obvious, therefore, that to increase the sense of immersion you engage the readers other senses through their imagination. However, I am not talking about those five senses in this article – I’m talking about the other five senses that are equally important in making your writing come to life:
A Sense of Place
In fantasy, the sense of place is often overlooked as the writer engages in creating their world. They create gleaming towers and forbidding castles, forgetting that people have to live somewhere and grow things to eat. Creating an imaginary place is harder, in some ways, than setting your story in a real place. You have to imagine not just how it is, but how it came to be like that. Terry Pratchett does a fantastic job of this with Ankh-Morpork and, however unlikely a place it seems, you know the twin cities evolved from real places with real histories.
Readers carry around with them a huge knowledge of the world, and as a writer you can use that knowledge to evoke a sense of place in the mind of the reader and bring a place to life. To do this, you need to develop the eye of a photographer, and start looking at the world around you with a new and inquisitive eye. Develop a curiosity about strange names, oddly curved streets, eccentric landmarks and historic buildings.
Each place has its own story, and that story can feed your story.
A Sense of Purpose
As Kurt Vonnegut said in his Eight Rules of Writing (and his rules are much better than mine):
“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
~ Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction
In your story, each and every character should have a sense of purpose. Otherwise, why are they there? If they don’t have a purpose then they are cluttering up your story and diluting your action and should be cut. Be merciless – tell your characters, “Either come up with a reason to be here or get the hell out!”
However, not every character reveals their purpose immediately. In your first draft, be tolerant, let characters hang out and discover their purpose by interacting with others. Let them develop, mature and come into focus. Only if you get into editing and you still don’t know why a character exists should you excise them from the story.
A Sense of Humour
Kurt Vonnegut also said: ~
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
It is easy to get lost in the dreadful happenings with which you are torturing your characters. If you are writing well and things are flowing then you will be caught up on the action and driven to the end.
At these times you may need to remind yourself that life has a sense of humour, and that by echoing that humour and letting it resonate through your darkest times, you lift the entire story and give it depth and flavour that undiluted dread never has.
Remember to make them smile while you’re persecuting them.
A Sense of Proportion
If you are writing stories, and especially if you are writing fantasy or science fiction, it is important to give your characters something to fight for, and what better to fight for than their existence? In fact, why stop at their existence? Why not have them fight for the existence of time and space itself? Either they succeed in their quest or the universe ends.
This is where you need a sense of proportion, for it seems that size does matter after all, but not in the way you perhaps thought. Let’s consider – if the universe ended we would all be dead. Would we care then? Annihilation is not the threat it seems to be. The death of everything just isn’t personal enough.
Small things matter. A robin who carries a worm back to the nest to feed its chick, only to be caught and killed by a cat as it tries to land, matters more to us than a planet crashing into a star in fiery doom. We can empathise with a bird, or even with the worm, but not with a planet.
You are the most important person in the world to you (parenthood notwithstanding). Your loved ones are next. Your close friends after that. No-one can truly care about people they don’t know and have never met. So if your story does not allow you to meet and know the people involved, the reader will not care.
It is what happens to those people that matters, not what happens to the universe.
A Sense of Wonder
As a fantasy writer you would expect me to say that a sense of wonder is important, but I think this transcends genre.
Even in a fantasy novel, a sense of wonder does not necessarily come from magic. It can come from the cry of a new-born baby, or a person suddenly realising an inner truth. It can arise from revelations in the plot or from the discovery that a character you thought you knew can do something truly unexpected and still be true to themselves.
However it arises, a sense of wonder brings light into someone else’s existence, gives them the strength to overcome their own difficulties and can, at its best, change someone’s life.
More than that, it is a gift given to strangers, without expectation of reward, which restores our faith in human nature.
SciFi & Fantasy Book of the Year 2010
Posted by Mike in Books and Reviews, Road to Bedlam on January 3, 2011
Well, the polls have closed and the votes counted and I am delighted to announce the SciFi & Fantasy Book of the Year for 2010 is: ~
The Road to Bedlam
Close behind was Pink Noise by Leonid Korogodski and Amortals by Matt Forbeck (also published by Angry Robot Books)
I would like to thank everyone who voted in the poll for making it such an interesting and engaging race, and everyone who voted for The Road to Bedlam in particular for your support and enthusiasm.
My thanks and appreciation go to Ant at SFBook.com for hosting the competition in sometimes difficult circumstances and for sticking with it and sorting it all out in the end.
I am told that the poll will run again next year, so look out for twelve new books to vote for.
Thanks, everyone.
Finding Your Voice
Continuing to take a serious look after my tongue-in-cheek article, the Twelve Rules of Writing, we have reached number five, which is concerned with the writer’s voice. Here’s the original rule to remind you: ~
5. Develop a writer’s voice
In order to be a successful writer you will need to develop a style which is distinctive and immediately identifiable. To help develop your writer’s voice, try doing impressions of other writers. YouTube is great for this as you can download clips of writers and imitate their speech patterns. Once you have the hang of it, you can try developing your own voice.
We are told that so-and-so is the new voice of Science Fiction and that editors are always looking for new voices. We are also told that your voice should be unique, distinctive and original. It is not revealed, however, what your voice should be. That, after all, is up to you. It’s your voice. It’s a personal quest, which only you can undertake.
What do we mean, then, by voice? What is it that you’re looking for, that seems both elusive and obscure?
Here’s Mickey Spillane, talking about his name:
I got a kid named Mike…jeez, the names they gave ME. My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I’ve got all these names…but my Dad always called me Mick. My mother called me Babe, and Babe is not a nice name for a guy, unless you’re Babe Ruth.
~ from an interview with Michael Carlson for Crime Time.
Your voice is not one thing, but many. It’s the pace at which you tell stories – the timbre and tone you adopt. It’s where you place stress and emphasis and where you let things trail. It has both rhythm and timing, pace and punch, and forms a unique combination like a fingerprint. It’s about where you pause for breath, and what’s in that pause when it occurs.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not – never doubted –that if Mr Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls – occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror – I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode – whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed – and rise before me in this chamber.
~ from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
For some people, writer’s voice seems to come as easily as breathing. It’s as if they’re in the room as you read, literally a voice in your head. It helps if you’ve heard the writer read their work out loud, but for some, like the voices above, you don’t need to hear them – it’s there on the page. That didn’t happen by accident. I guarantee that the writer has worked to develop that voice. Maybe it’s a reflection of their natural voice, but even then it takes art to transfer it to the page so that it comes across in writing.
What can you do, then, to develop your own writer’s voice?
My advice to imitate writers voices from YouTube may have been flippant, but the idea of imitating other writers has some merit. Writing a short story or a piece of description in the style of another writer, whether it be as Charlotte Bronte, Mickey Spillane or another distinctive voice, gives you an idea of what makes that voice so distinctive. It makes you conscious of the elements brought into play, making it more explicit. You have to step back from the story and examine the words, the placing of punctuation, the delivery, to see what makes that voice.
Be sure to take more than one example and choose as many and varied as you can. Write as Tom Clancy, J R R Tolkein, P G Woodhouse, A A Milne – though with this last, you may find yourself channelling Alan Bennett by mistake. Then go back and look at what you’ve written and ask yourself – why is that sentence so long, or that comma placed there?
While your speaking voice is the product of your upbringing and your environment, and of the language(s) you speak, your writing voice is a cultured thing – something grown, developed and exercised. Having explored other voices, you need to find the voice in your own head, and heart, that expresses the truth that lies there.
In your imagination, create your own reader – they can be family, muse, friend, or lover – and bring your story to life for them. Make it personal, intimate and close – you’re not giving a lecture, you’re telling a story under the sheets by torchlight to someone with wide eyes and rapt attention. Watch their reactions as your story unfolds, pause while they hold their breath, race when the action is pumping, but tell it in your own way for that one person.
Finding your voice can take practice and time, but it is an essential part of what makes your stories unique, vivid and enjoyable for your readers. It is worth every moment invested and will make your stories stand out where others seem to lack something indefinable and essential.
Mike is on Goodreads
