How long should a novel be? I often get this question after the questioner has completed his or her novel. If you are unpublished, most publishers won’t consider a novel over 100,000 words. A good place to start is Google. Just Google the Genre of novel you have written. Hopefully you won’t exceed the usual length of your genre, but your novel is in the middle to lower half of word counts for your genre.
I also like to see something like, “The length of your novel can depend on various factors, including your writing style, the complexity of the plot and characters, and the specific subgenre of the novel. “The seemingly unhelpful responses are gold mine. Starting with “your writing style.” Every writer seems to instinctively know if they write in a sparse or verbose style.
Let’s say you are writing a mystery novel and it seems complete to you at 45,000 words. You also know that what you have written is a “cozy mystery.” When you look up the length of that genre you might get a reply like this, “Cozy mysteries tend to be shorter than other subgenres of crime fiction, coming in at around 50,000 to 60,000 words.” If you are adding words, look for descriptions that are now too sparse. Let’s say you have a character who is killed. You have written, “Sue entered the plush office before she was killed.” Sue, is just a minor character who is killed for some obvious reason such as she saw the killer, who is the central figure. Let’s expand the scene.
Sue knocked.
A voice that was definitely male answered, “Come in.”
Sue walked into a plush office. The dark wood of the oversized desk and paneling caused Sue to pause a moment and think, “I didn’t realize how rich Bruce is.” It was the last thought that Sue would ever have. A shot rang out.
The original was, “Sue walked into a plush office. Bruce shot her.” That’s a very abrupt murder. All we did was to give Sue a thought before Bruce acted. With a little bit of thought you can expand scenes and make them more impactful. Beginning writers will overwrite some scenes, but they were more likely to come in below their genre’s average word count.
