by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I’ve written before, generally a first novel by an unknown, previously unpublished novelist should be no more than 100,000 words. It’s because anything past that point, it becomes more and more risky, more and more cost prohibitive for the publisher to physically print the novel itself.
Now that I’m finally, gradually beginning to get out of the completely delusional stage of developing and writing this first novel into a phase that is at least a little bit closer to being grounded in something akin to reality, I find myself pondering my scene count.
You see, I don’t work in words, I would in scenes. Each scene, in general, is about 1,000 words. As such, I’m able to gauge, in general, how long the novel will be by the number of scenes. It’s not a perfect metric, but it’s the one I find works best with my personality. Right now — I have too many scenes. At the moment, the first draft of the novel is going to blow past that 100,000 word limit on a rather significant basis.
But the issue is, to tell the story I want to tell in the way that I can tell it given my ability — I’m beginning to fear that for the time being that excess word count is existential. My last attempt at a first draft was about 120,000 words and this first draft is, if I’m lucky, going to be around that length as well. But there’s a real risk that it could be longer.
And, yet, the story itself is really strong. I keep thinking about the scenes and there just isn’t much fat there. Each scene holds up and has a point for existing. I think what might happen — if I’m lucky — is somehow someone might like the general story and I’ll find myself with an editor who can whittle down the scene count to something a bit more manageable.
And this is the point when I’m reminded, again, that I suspect that for all my attempts to reverse engineer Stieg Larsson’s novels….I’m missing something about how he developed his works. Something is going on with his novels that I just can’t figure out. Did he write extensive character studies? How did he go about writing his novels in the context of structure?
I’ve used repeated readings of his novel The Girl Who Played With Fire to produce a few very arbitrary rules of thumb that I use to map out the novel. It’s because of these rules that it’s both taken a lot longer than I expected and the novel is slowly shaping up to be a lot better than I originally thought possible. It’s taken me a long, long time to get to this point, but I’m finally beginning to feel pretty juiced about my prospects.
But I’m still being delusional. I’m an untested, unpublished novelist who if you do due diligence on me without knowing anything about me — you’re probably going to think I’m a drunk crank. So, who knows. But at least I’m feeling pretty good.
I think I’m within shouting distance of writing a pretty good pop novel that at least won’t embarrass me.
