Tag Archives: how many words in a novel

When your novel comes up short

I just finished my latest novel.

Yay!  Right?

Umm, well not really.

For the first time in my life … My novel came up short.

I normally write huge, sweeping epic novels.  The last one I had to hack up into five novels.  The one before had three parts.  My mind just thinks “big”.

This time, I tried to center my mind on a one-week timeframe.  I carefully plotted it out, and assigned word counts.  I thought it would be close, but I didn’t expect to be WAY OFF my target word count.

Do I have stuff to add?  Well, yes, thank goodness.  There are a few things that I found I needed at the end that will need to be introduced earlier on.  The problem is, I need about 12,000 words, and I imagine the additions will only total to about 1,000 words.  11,000 more to go.

Yikes again.

I’ve edited 23 pages, and have added 230 words.  I figure the total added for general editing will be about 2000 words.  That’s 9,000 to go.

I don’t want to write unnecessary scenes just to make word count.  I wrote tightly.  Everything is spot-on.

Maybe a little too spot on.

Has anyone else ever had this problem?

 Well I don’t like it.  Nope. Not at all.

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