Word Counts and Being Quoted
I’ve been writing more and more on my novel idea. It just keeps growing and growing in my head and on the page. I will sit down to do a chapter and they all seem to be getting longer, the world it inhabits growing larger and clearer in my head. I feel that strong rewrites/editing will be needed on the first chapters now, but that shouldn’t be too hard. I hope…
I think I have a title for the book, but am going to sit on it for now, not sure if it is exactly the one I am going to use, but I like it, it fits in very well with my chapter titles. If that’s a good thing?
I decided to do some research on word counts, just to see exactly what I am up against. Last time I looked I could not get anyhting close to any sort of definitive answer about how long a novel should be. If it had to be over 300,000 words then I thought maybe I should just give up now, haha, no seriously…
Always to the rescue, Wikipedia saved my ass once more. I managed to get the the Word Count page and I liked what I saw. And it seems to stem from the Science Fiction Writers of America, so I’ll take it as close to gospel, nerds like that are rarely wrong in this new age of technology.
There appear to be categorical amounts of words for each type of writing. They are as follows (completely copied from the Wikipedia page, but my brown background is much better to view it on):
Flash Fiction - under 1,000 words (I have never heard of this before…)
Short Story - 1,000 to 7,500 words (I have a few in this range)
Novelette - 7,500 to 17,500 (I had never heard of this one either, but I have two in this range)
Novella - 17,500 to 80,000 (I always think of Hearts In Atlantis as my reference, if you don’t know the story go and buy it now and love it, love it again and again!)
Novel - 80,000+ words (slowly carving my way towards this right now)
I also found out that the industry standard is to fit 250 words to a page. That’s always interesting to note. Little shit like this completely sucks me in, I love it. Process of writing is so fascinating to a writing nerd like me.
So, it looks like I am definitely working on a novel right now. Nearly halfway there is the numbers are any indication. Nice, have to keep plugging away at it. I am hitting it most every night and it just keeps feeling better. I will write in small background characters, but as I set them up I start to like them and realise they could fit into so much more of the story. I just created a duo the other night and I really want to see how they fare in my brave new world.
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Speaking of Wikipedia, I have been quoted on one of their most esteemed pages.
His wiki page lists me as the 10th referenced site down the bottom, click above and check if you don’t believe me. Proof again that the wwInterweb is home to anyone’s ideas and no knowledge whatsoever, and furthermore proof that Wikipedia probably cannot always be trusted. But this site can, surely…
It’s funny because I get so many hits from google searches of itsjustsomerandomguy. I also get a lot of love from people looking for ‘initrode’ who end up on my site because of a previous post. Interesting how google searches work.
Posted on October 21st, 2008 by ryan
Filed under: Writing, websites
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