by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve finally gotten into the part of the first novel of this four novel series that is called the “fun and games” part of the story. It’s the beginning of the second act and it’s the reason why you buy the book in the first place. Everything is going well — and the actual writing of the novel is speeding up greatly — but for one thing: I’m having some existential angst about word count.
The rule of thumb about first novels is the sweet spot is in the 80,000 – 110,000 word range for various reasons. The biggest reason is far more practical than you might realize — if you’re a new, untested author, for the publisher to be willing to physically print anything beyond that is something of a risk.
I’ve been using Stieg Larsson’s work as a guide, but it’s beginning to dawn on me that there were specific things relative to his books that aren’t applicable to what I’m up against. One, it’s my understanding he was an established journalist in Sweden at the time he got four longish books published. And the books were originally for the Swedish market nearly 20 years ago, so that also may have given him the ability to write longer as a first-time novelist.
But I’ve gotten this far with this first book — pretty much all I have to do is just follow my outline at this point — that I’m just going to just that. This is just the first draft and no one is going to read it. I do find it annoying that I’ve spent all this time laying out an outline with a certain length, only for it to occur to me this late in the process that I’ve probably designed outlines of novels, on an existential basis, that are just too long.
And, yet, given that I’m writing four novels at once, I think I can probably be ok if I shorten the first two novels some and keep the last two novels about the same length as they’ve always been. I’m completely clueless of the dynamic associated with trying to sell four novels as a first-time novelist instead of just one, so I’m hoping that this will be ok.
I still have a lot of work to do. But it will be nice, for my ego, if nothing else, when I complete a longish first draft of the first book. Then I can take a deep breath and start to work on the second book’s first draft.
