Vellichor Ink

One of my favorite authors, VE Schwab, said, when asked how she writes a novel, One word at a time. She didn’t have a sweeping answer or a daily word count goal. Just…one word at a time.

Every book you read has a number of words. There are parameters and expectations for certain genres and, the more an author writes and gets published, an expectation in that way, as well. We all know authors who are wordier than others (looking at you Alexandre Dumas) and authors who are succinct and purposeful with their prose. Some of the older classics are relatively short compared to what the “norm” is now. (Gatsby is around 48,000 words).

The average word counts for non-fiction books are:

• Romance: 70,000-90,000
• Mystery: 70,000-90,000
• Sci-fi: 80,000-120,000
• Fantasy: 90,000-120,000

For reference, some popular books have the following word counts:

• In Death by JD Robb: 78, 250
• Beach Read by Emily Henry: 96,000
• The Martian by Andy Weir: 104,588
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon: 305,000
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab: 160,000
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien: 95,000

When you’re an established and beloved author, you can get away with a higher word count. But newbies and really genre specific authors don’t get so much wiggle room. After all, more words means more pages and more pages means higher cost to print.

Regardless of how many words you find on the pages of your favorite books, they all had to get there one by one.

When I started the first book, I set a goal of 80,000 words. It fell right in the middle of some of the averages and I wasn’t quite sure what to consider In the Light of the Moon anyway. There’s romance and fantasy (but not high fantasy) but also historical elements (a little more so later in the story). I ended up with 108,000 words in my first draft. That was whittled down quite a bit and it ended up at 94,860.

With allllll that being said, I finally surpassed 20,000 words for my current manuscript.

There is something about that number, that 20,000, that somehow tells my brain that it’s going to get finished. I realize that’s weird, but writers are weird. We have odd rituals and things we do to get the wild and wonderful stories from our brains down to paper. So, when I see that number, that’s the biggest hurdle for me to get to. I have a goal of 100,000 with most of the books. That gives me plenty of space to tell the story and plenty of wiggle room to edit out redundancy. So I hit 20k and then it’s just a quick slide into 25k and that’s a quarter of the book finished. And then, 50K is halfway. And one word past that means I’m closer to the end goal than not so I should definitely keep writing. And 75k is three-quarters and it would be so silly to stop there.

Anyway, you get the idea.

So, I hit 20,000 words and a revelation. I think this might be a duology. I just don’t think I can tell the story in one book. Maybe I can. Hopefully I can. But the stirrings of maybe this is more than one are there. And I SWORE I’d not do another series. But that’s just another example of never say never or you’ll eat your words. All 20,000 of them, apparently.