Counting on it...

How many words is enough?

It’s a question that comes up a lot when people are writing.  The simple answer is, there are enough words when your story is finished. 

Take Fahrenheit 451, for example.  A well-known classic, it comes in at a word count of 46,118.  Compare that with The Fellowship of the Ring at around 187,000, and consider that is only the first part of that story. 

There are rumours that a publisher or agent won’t look at a first time novel unless it falls around 90,000 words – you can only go higher if you are established. 

That may be the average word count for a first time novel, and maybe I have a misplaced faith here, but surely it depends on what you’ve written?

If an agent or publisher likes your book, I don’t think they would dismiss it because it’s “too long”.  Perhaps it would need tightening up, and can shed a few words here and there.  Perhaps if it’s huge, it could be split into two books.  (The opposite happened to The Fellowship of the Ring – originally two books it is now thought of as one.)

I’m not too worried about word count so far as my novels go – I’ll tell the story and see where I end up.  I have a feeling I’ll hit around the average.

What has got me thinking about word count is my short story collection.  The stories in it vary from 620 at the shortest, to 10,020 at the longest.  The shortest one there may only be a page, but that is all that was needed to tell that story.

However I want the collection in itself to provide a decent amount of entertainment.  There isn’t an answer to how many stories should be in a short story collection, because as demonstrated above, you could say ten, and I could write ten 620-word stories, which wouldn’t be a very long read at all. 

So I’m adding up all the words in my stories to see how they totally compare to novels.  By comparing this count to books I’ve read, I can confidently say – yes, this is going to be a decent length read. 

By my calculations, I could use another three to four stories of around 6000 words.  Coincidentally, I have three to four more stories I wanted to tell for this collection.

Isn’t it nice when things work out like that?