At Immortal Works, we like to say that your average debut novel should be between 80k and 100k words. There are some very good reasons for that. 80,000 words is a good size for a nice, leisurely read. Not too long, not too short. For context, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is about 76,000 words.
In my work in acquisitions I’ve encountered a lot of emerging authors who think their work has to be long in order to be good. I can see where they’re coming from – just look at the bricks Brandon Sanderson has been publishing! Brandon Sanderson is a good author, and Brandon Sanderson’s books are long, ergo to be a good author one must pen very long books. Perfect example: one author who submitted a 111,000 word novel actually worried that his book was too short!
Let’s discuss Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Even Jordan’s fans admit that he is overly verbose. He could have made his books half as long and not have sacrificed a thing in terms of nuance, plot, and character development. In fact, the middle four books of the series are referred to as “a slog.” Observe:
The meme indicates the guy had to make three attempts to read through the whole series. Not exactly a glowing review.
I felt the same way about the Outlander series. Outlander is LONG. The first book is 259k words. I got about a third the way through before I gave up. You want to know why it was long? Not because a lot of stuff happened. The author takes three times as long to convey information, and her characters have long, circular conversations that never get to the point.
Does this opinion make me a mean, Scrooge-like lady for not giving a wonderful book a second chance? No. What it makes me is a busy mom who had better things to do than give my time to a book that didn’t sufficiently capture my attention.
What I’m trying to say here is having a lot of words on the page is not a guarantee of it being worth reading.
I’m also trying to say that a lot of people are busy. If you want to write a long book, that’s perfectly fine. Be my guest. But if you want people to read it, your book had better be as action-packed as Harry Potter and you’d better have dang good writing. When you ask someone to read your book, you need to compete with everything else in that person’s life. Your book has to be more interesting than their Pinterest feed, Netflix, and their household chores.
People will read books long books if they are of sufficient quality. Order of the Phoenix was 257k, and I read that in less than a day when it came out in 2003. Oathbringer clocks in at 479,000 words and Sanderson’s fans devoured it.
I am writing this blog post in the first place because I recently received a submission for a book 164,000 words long (for comparison, that’s about the same length as The Half-Blood Prince). By way of constructive feedback, I told the author that it might be a good idea if he cut it back to 80k-100k. He didn’t like that suggestion and said it would “dilute the themes.” He said that the high word count “gives the characters time to gradually reveal their personality, lets the plot unravel, allows the atmosphere to settle in,” and to cut anything would result in “an incoherent mess of ideas and tangled plotlines.”
Here’s the thing: What if I told you that you could keep all your themes and – in addition! – keep your prose tight and succinct?
I’ll show you how by letting you see a very embarrassing passage I wrote in 2005, back when I was too young in my career to know how far I still had to go. Here it is:
He remembered the boredom he felt in Khaldunia, his desperation to escape the suffocating Harem politics that had killed his mother and sent his two older sisters to be brides of men twice their age, a fate that was worse than death. Men who did not value them as anything other than slaves. The old anger and hurt came to him again. Daughters of a minor wife did not count for much. He clasped the hilt of his dagger and recalled his impotence in the field of battle. He did not save her village. He was a poor commander. He mentally shook himself out of that train of thought. He was starting to probe into the dark place in his soul that housed his feelings. He found that if he focused too much on that place, everything else fell apart.
Let’s be honest. This is boring, sentimental navel-gazing, full of passive voice. All telling, no showing.
To fix it, let’s allow the character’s words and actions tell us what he thinks and feels.
Anharin clasped the hilt of his dagger so hard his knuckles turned white, his eyes blazed.
Ilzadar recoiled. “Have I said something wrong? I didn’t mean to imply that you failed–“
Anharin cut her off. “But I did fail. I was in command, and my men still burned your village. I can’t seem to save anyone I care about, not you, nor my mother, nor my sisters.”
“What happened to them?”
“Best not to say. Daughters of a minor wife don’t count for much.”
The first passage is 140 words. The second is 83. There’s dialog. People talking to each other are more interesting than an inwardly running commentary. All the relevant details are there. This is the essence of what it means to hone your craft. It’s easy to wander all over the page and hope you get somewhere, but it takes a lot more skill to do have a clear destination in mind and lead other people there with as few words as possible.
When editors and agents look at your work, they don’t care about your themes, or the artistic, wandering nature of your naturally unfolding plot. They care about a good story. If your purple prose makes your book a Robert-Jordan-style slog, no one will want to read it.
Beth Buck 