I received another question about telling a story. “How can I tell if my idea is big enough for a novel?” If it is word count you are asking about, that varies by genre and current market. Get a list of current bestsellers in the area you want to write in and go to your local library. Look at the number of pages in the book. I have used and seen a rough figure in the author’s help articles to figure 250 words per page. You simply have to multiply the number of pages by 250 to get close to the word count. An excellent place to start might be this website, https://careerauthors.com/genre-book-length/.
Now that you got some goal in mind, there are two ways you might want to go. Some people like to totally outline chapter by chapter and scene by scene. Others just want to start out by winging it and starting to outline only with an idea in their head. Which you want to do is totally up to you. If you outlined your future novel, then finish a chapter and ask your word processing program for a word count. You multiply that by the number of chapters you put in your outline.
If you winging it, it’s a good idea to write somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words. That is a nice size chapter. Then you need to figure out how much of the story you have told in the first bit of writing. If it is most of the story, then you need to expand the story. If it is only a fraction of what might be told in a chapter, then your idea is too big. It might be a good idea to turn it into more than one novel. It all comes down to common sense.
You know what typical word count for the genre you are writing in. You also know the number of words you produced that might be a chapter. Take it from there and write your novel.
