About a year ago I chose to give up writing genre fiction, which I’d been writing since I was 13, and focus on what I considered more ‘literary’ fiction. With the exception of the re-release of ‘Half Discovered Wings’, my first novel (2009) and a fantasy, which was more for nostalgia than anything else, my efforts have been towards more meaningful (and marketable) fiction:
I also discontinued sale of some of my other material that was available on Amazon and Smashworlds, namely the science fiction short story collection ‘The Gas Giant Sequence’ and the steampunk fantasy adventure stories in my ‘Professor Arnustace’ series. Although I’m super proud of these works, which were a lot of fun to write, and despite the fact that they sold far more than my other releases, they weren’t fitting with the direction I wanted to go in. I know, how arty of me.
It’s both pleasing and distressing that I’ve had such a response from readers about this. The second ‘Professor Arnustace’ story in particular had some of my best reviews, and I still get messages asking whether there will be a third. Although I don’t have plans for the gentleman detective, as a thank-you I’ve decided to make all my discontinued stories available here for free. Yay!
You will need to connect your e-reader to your computer to copy across the files to your device.
If you own a TV or have access to the internet, you’ve probably already heard that today is “Future Day” – the day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to from 1985 in “Back to the Future: Part II”. The film depicted a future wildly different from today’s reality – hoverboards instead of skateboards, flying cars (and white vans), and peculiar fashions that never quite made it.
As the world celebrates this fun adventure trilogy of films, which are some of my childhood favourites, there’s plenty of opportunity to see how the fictional future of BttF2 stacks up against real-life 2015.
Of course, the films were never meant to accurately predict what 2015 would look like. I’m sure the writers and production crew had plenty of serious discussions about the practical likelihood of certain aspects, but the overriding factor would be originality and humour (and the odd call-back to the previous film, such as the skateboard sequence). No-one can blame BttF for being inaccurate, so let’s just enjoy the spectacle.
It does beggar the question, however, of how to accurately predict the future when writing science fiction. No-one can predict the future, but we can make pretty good guesses. The age-old question of whether science is influenced by science fiction (such as the constant efforts to create hover technology from “Back to the Future”, lightsabers from “Star Wars” and teleportation machines from “Star Trek”) is probably quite pertinent. Sadly, as writers, we can hardly create a future filled with lightsabers simply because that’s a possibility – it would be unoriginal, not to mention fodder for Disney’s legal team (in case you forgot, Disney own “Star Wars” now. Ack.)
I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen. It was a wholly unoriginal science fiction story heavily influenced by “The X-Files”, “The Terminator” and “Back to the Future”. In “Fourth Millennium”, which will hopefully never be leaked onto the internet, my protagonist was a desperate hovercraft racer who undertakes an illegal cyberization procedure to give him faster reflexes. During his next race he is unwittingly blasted a thousand years into the future, where he must prevent a shady cyborg and government organisations from destroying the world with insectoid alien clones.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Needless to say, I soon realised that I should never attempt to publish “Fourth Millennium” or its tedious sequels. They may have been fun for me to write, but aside from the originality aspect, they could hardly be considered accurate depictions of the future. Who can guess what the year 3,000 will look like, if the human race is even still here?
I’m reminded of a piece of literature a lecturer of mine mentioned once. I wish I could remember the name of the story or the writer. In it, a future several hundred years from now is depicted. Modern sci-fi writers have ridiculed the story because the only noticeable difference between the time period in which it was written and the supposed future was that people sat in chairs that floated. Several hundred years of scientific development. Woe betide any writer who makes the same mistake.
Scientific advancement is zipping along at light-speed, so the likes of “Back to the Future” can be forgiven. In just 75 years we have seen the invention of television, colour television, flat screen television, 3D television … smart phones barely larger than credit cards that include sophisticated cameras, calculators, calendars, address books and video games … Gaming that has progressed from Pong to Donkey Kong to Sonic the Hedgehog to Ocarina of Time to The Last of Us (see also my earlier article on the development of the Final Fantasy video game series) … cinema technology that has developed from “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” to “Casablanca” to “Back to the Future” to “Avatar” (Cineworld Sheffield is currently constructing our first “4D” cinema screen) … All within the span of a single lifetime.
My first serious science fiction novel, “Faith in Chrome”, was set 80 years into the future. I decided to be inventive but fairly realistic. I decided that the world would feature sophisticated artificial intelligence programs, but that they were tightly restricted. There would be convenient personal tools in the form of microscopic nanomachines, but that they were expensive and not commercially available. There would be hovering vehicles, but that regular roads, shipping lanes and air travel were generally preferred. Video games are fully immersive online hallucinary experiences. Many processes were mechanised, such as sentry guard duty. Why not? There would be no space travel or alien encounters, not since NASA had its hands tied under Obama and for as long as the Drake equation is our best “evidence” of otherworldly life (although there have been exciting developments on Mars this year, and I’m not talking about Matt Damon’s latest film).
So how can science fiction be more honest, practical and – ultimately – accurate?
Assuming that this is your goal, rather than the wild and brilliant fun-scapes of Iain M. Bank’s Culture books for example, then we can simply extrapolate. My earlier paragraph about TVs, phones and video games should give you a starting point. See where we have been, what we have now, and ask “what next”? Ask yourself if your ideas are practical. Will these inventions be too expensive to make commercially, and therefore cost-prohibitive for most of the world? Were they derived from military technology, as most of our best tech today is? Are they too impractical or unsafe to use (why use expensive, power-hungry laser rifles when lead bullets are cheap and just as deadly?)…? Who would fund their development and why?
As you ponder what your future will look like, enjoy this message from Doc Brown himself, which is as poignant as it is corny:
Whenever I meet other writers, one of the questions that often comes up is: “How long should my novel be?” There are variations on the question, such as “How long is too long?” and “How short is too short?” I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find some reliable answers to these questions myself, and decided to write up the results for the benefit of fellow authors.
Discussing novel lengths and word counts
It’s easiest to talk about the length of fiction in terms of word count, rather than pages. The reason for this is simple: if you say your short story is twenty pages, I would say “What size font? Double or single spaced? What size are your margins? Do you use a lot of snappy dialogue, or dense blocks of narrative?” Compare a few pages of a sparse novel, such as James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces“, to a dense tome such as Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow“, and you’ll get the idea.
Every word processor has a function to count the words in your text, so don’t be afraid to use it! Publishers will want to know how long your novel is in number of words; the same goes if you submit it to an editor or proofreader for that critical review before you submit for print or publication.
Determining your ideal word count
If you have an idea for a novel and you’re familiar with the genre, there’s an easy way to decide how long it should be. Let’s say you’d like to write the next steamy romance bestseller along the lines of “Fifty Shades of Grey”. Go to the Romance section of Waterstones or your local bookshop (if there are any left in your area) and pick up a few similar titles. You’ll notice that, generally speaking, they’re all about the same thickness, and have similarly sized fonts within. The reason for this is that the publishers have a very good idea of how long this kind of book should be, and stick to it. If you want them to publish your novel, then you should stick to it too.
One way to guess a book’s word count is to count the number of pages (say 300) and times it by 250 (average number of words per page) to get the total word count (in this case, 75,000 words).
250 words is a good guess per page, but this depends on the font size. If you want to get a more accurate calculation, open one of those Romance books (or a book from your chosen genre) and count how many words are in each of the first ten lines. Work out an average, then times it by the number of lines on the page. This will likely be between 200 and 260 words. Then you can times it by the number of pages in the book.
Number of words on a full line x Number of lines on the page x Number of pages in the book
Word count of famous novels
As an illustration, here are some famous novels that will be easily to find in your local bookshop, with their word lengths (credit goes to this site):
30,500 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (Children’s)
36,000 – Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis (Children’s)
46,000 – Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (Science fiction)
47,000 – The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (Literary drama)
49,500 – Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut (Science fiction)
56,500 – As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner (Literary drama)
60,000 – Lord of the Flies – William Golding (Literary drama)
63,500 – Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Wool (Literary drama)
67,000 – Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson (Adventure)
67,500 – The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (Wartime drama)
73,500 – The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger (Coming of age)
77,500 – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J. K. Rowling (Children’s)
78,500 – The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde (Literary drama)
85,000 – The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera (Literary drama)
89,000 – Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (Science fiction)
89,000 – Waiting – Ha Jin (Literary drama)
100,000 – To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee (Drama)
113,000 – The Golden Compass – Philip Pullman (Fantasy)
119,500 – My Sisters Keeper – Jodi Picoult (Drama)
123,500 – Atonement – Ian McEwan (Family saga)
138,000 – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne (Fantasy)
144,500 – One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Family saga)
145,500 – Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper (Historical drama)
156,000 – Emma – Jane Austen (Romance)
156,000 – Watership Down – Richard Adams (Adventure)
183,500 – Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (Coming of age)
184,000 – Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (Romance)
206,000 – Moby Dick – Herman Melville (Adventure)
208,500 – Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (Fantasy drama)
211,500 – Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Drama)
236,000 – A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (Drama)
257,000 – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J. K. Rowling (Children’s)
418,000 – Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (Historical epic)
455,000 – The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) – J. R. R. Tolkien (Epic fantasy)
562,000 – Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand (Drama)
587,000 – War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Drama)
So, should you emulate these great authors? J. K. Rowling’s “Order of the Phoenix” was a whopping 257,000 words, so should you aim for this when writing your first fantasy book for children? Hell, no. Apart from the fact that dear J. K. really, really needed a good editor in the post-Azkaban years, she was also by then well established and immensely successful. She had free rein to do whatever she liked, much to the detriment of children’s fiction everywhere.
Also, books we now consider classics were often significantly longer back in the day than popular books now. Why? Because there was less competition; because they were often written and published in installments; and because being wordy and “literary” was what made one a “proper” writer and worthy of being read (although it should be noted that many authors now considered masters were thought of as trashy during their own time. Fortunately for E.L. James).
Average word count by genre
My personal recommendation when it comes to choosing your word count is to go on the standard for the genre. Publishers follow these loose guidelines for a reason. There are always exceptions, so take them with a pinch of salt, but they are a handy guide. If you’re out by more than 10,000 words, then you should re-think your plot or give it a thorough editing.
Literary: 60 to 90,000 words
Young adult: 45 to 80,000 words
Romance: 85 to 100,000 words
Cozy mysteries: 65 to 90,000 words
Thrillers: 90 to 100,000 words
Popular & chick-lit: 80 to 100,000 words
Epic sci-fi & fantasy: 100 to 120,000 words
Modern sci-fi & fantasy: 80 to 100,000 words
Horror: 80 to 100,000 words
Western: 80 to 100,000 words
No doubt some people will disagree with some of these, so I encourage responses in the comments section!
For some final words, and advice for debut novelists, check this part 2 of this post here. Thanks for reading!
The STP Literary Service 