July 23, 2018 – Felicia Denise, Author

Camp NaNo Update #22 banner

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What are acceptable book lengths? Answers can vary depending on who you ask, but in general:

Flash fiction: 500 words or less.

Short Story: 5,000–10,000 words.

Novella: 10,000–40,000 words.

Novel: Anything over 40,000 words,

Some writers only write one length, meaning everything they write is always over 40K, or less than 10K, etc. It can also depend on genre and content.

But, that’s if you’re planning a certain type of book.

What if you set out to write 75, 000 words but only get to 36,000, did you fail?

Not necessarily.

Perhaps you were overzealous in estimating book length, or, you haven’t gone deep to flesh out and develop characters or plot.

I have a Camp NaNo buddy who’s having a meltdown as we begin counting down the last week of Camp NaNoWriMo.

She pledged to write a book 65K in length, but she’s written all of her planned twenty-six scenes/chapters and has only reached 48K.

The beauty of Camp NaNo is you can adjust your words/pages/hours. When I suggested she do this, her meltdown intensified. So, I took the opposite approach and told her to get busy writing because the missing 17K wasn’t going to write itself.

She insists she’s told the story she intended to tell.

So. What’s the problem here?

Focus.

Books are the products of imagination and research but they’re not rocket science.

We’ve all read the book we wished was longer, just as we’ve read that book which went on and on and because laborious.

Editing can solve most of these problems if writers allow it. If an editor advises cutting out characters/scenes/chapters and the writer balks, there isn’t much the editor can do. There is no literary death match between writers and editors.

Writers must be ready to kill their darlings to publish the best book possible, and sometimes that also means adjusting our mindsets… and word counts.

Because everyone knows the first draft is crap anyway.

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Day 20 word count – 37,511

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Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.

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