The Woes of Word Counts

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

  ~William Strunk, Jr.

The dreaded red pen

Being concise is difficult; so difficult many writers won’t do it unless forced. Most of us regard the red pen with fear and loathing. We don’t want to edit, we don’t want to cut. So why do we have to? We love words. Why can’t we write as many of them as we want?

The simplest reason is that the publishing industry clearly demands it. The magic number is 100,000. You can’t go over that word count for a novel without severely hampering your chances of getting published. (In some genres, it’s even less.) To be honest, I don’t really understand why this is. Maybe one of our readers in the publishing industry can explain it. In a recent informal, completely nonscientific survey, the majority of my friends said they prefer long books: the longer, the better. They like getting lost in another world. We can all think of a dozen bestselling exceptions to the 100,000 rule: War & Peace. Pillars of the Earth. Gone with the Wind. Harry Potter. According to this guy, all modern books (all!) are too long. So we may be forgiven for feeling sniffy when agents tell us to keep our submissions short.

Doubles as a doorstop

One thing to keep in mind is that the demand for succinctness seems to apply primarily to unpublished writers. The Deathly Hallows is 759 pages, but The Sorcerer’s Stone is only 309. Rowling was probably forced to be more terse than she wanted with that first novel: once she established herself as a bestselling author, she was allowed to indulge. It is also true that some debut novels are massive: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl’s first novel, is 514 pages long — which translates to about 200,000 words. We look at her, cross our envious arms over our chests, and think, well if she can do it …

But the most salient truth here is this: many literary agents really do reject on word-count alone, and it’s never a good idea for a novice to assume she’s the next Marisha Pessl. Getting published is hard enough. To ignore the word-count guideline is to run a marathon with one leg hobbled.

Not an ideal way to enter a marathon

Another reason to write shorter is that it will force you to write better. “The only art is to omit,” said Robert Louis Stevenson. “If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it’s amateur work.” When I write freelance articles, I’m usually required to write no more than 800 words. My notes and interview transcripts run thousands of words, and it all seems important.

This is going to hurt

But I have to be economical: if I don’t slice those words, my editor will, and I’d rather be the one holding the scalpel. This forced concision means I have to think hard about word choice. Not only word by word, but paragraph by paragraph. Some passages, especially descriptive ones, add nothing substantive. They’re decorative, and when you’re on a word budget, decoration is the first thing to go.

Not everyone, of course, is inclined to write long. Last summer I took a writing class with a woman struggling to complete a middle-grade book. She’d been told she needed to add about 2,000 words to get it to the “right” word count for that genre, and she was devastated. “I don’t know if I can do that,” she said, mournfully regarding the pages in her hands. I was puzzled: for one thing, 2,000 words doesn’t seem like that much. For another thing: think of the chances she had to develop character! To wax eloquent with a scene description! To throw in some snappy dialogue! But for some writers, reaching the word-count minimum is the trick. (That magic number, if you’re wondering, is 50K for mainstream adult fiction; 30K for middle-grade.)

What about you? Do you feel hampered by industry’s word-count limits, or do you find the guidelines helpful? Do you wonder, especially with the growing popularity of e-readers, if this limitation is becoming irrelevant? Have you been told by an agent or editor you need to cut — and if so, how did it affect your story?

 Too many notes, Herr Mozart

No novice writer needs to apply: the myths surrounding that first novel

More myths have been created around the publishing of a first novel than about JFK’s murder. The “experts” agree that publishing houses prefer to stay clear off first literary attempts and even if a novice writer gets the longed-for breakthrough, he or she must never expect instant fame, invitations to Oprah or even a decent amount of cash in exchange for the untried manuscript. Is that ominous scenery even close to truth?


Go back in time and remember that first time you went looking for a job. Remember how your eyes scanned the ads and kept meeting those ominous words “experience required”? It seemed like nobody wanted you and yet you did get a job. The same goes for novice writers. Somewhere, somehow, unless their MS are written in Pidgin English, every writer gets his day. Hundreds of new writers emerge every year. And wait! Some make it to that iconic honor roll, The New York Times Bestseller list.




A couple of years ago, I went cross-eyed, reading article after article declaring that first novels, even if published, were just rehearsals into the Real McCoy. And then I heard of Jo Graham. Today, Miss Graham is a well recognized writer who merits her own Wikipedia entry, but back in 2008 she was a newcomer to the business. However, her first novel Black Ships, a retelling of the Aeneid, could be found among Amazon´s bestselling historical fantasies.



I had never seen a picture of Jo Graham, but she became my idol, the person I wanted to be when I grew up. Here was a novice writer who, at the noble age of forty, had published a historical fantasy, and yet was not hiding in some dingy bookstore, boring housewives to death. She was in Amazon‘s list off successful books, and would eventually go to win the Locus Award for First Novel. Jo Graham was a success story incarnated. She had proven all the prophets of doom wrong. Moreover, she had broken a tremendous taboo. She had published excerpts of her novel in the World Wide Web for all her friends to read!


Was it sheer luck or are there more Jo Grahams in the making? Well, the fact that Locus, a well known magazine devoted to Science Fiction and Fantasy grants a yearly award to the best First Novel is a telling sign. If you examine the list of winners you´ll find two of my favorite historical fantasies: Naomi Novick’s Temeraire, and Susannah Clark´s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Temeraire was the first volume of a very successful series, and Ms Clark´s first novel has been sold to Hollywood. Not bad!

There are plenty of literary awards for a first book so not everyone in the industry is unwilling to touch newcomers. And even novels that get no critical accolades can make it big. Let's see, what about an improbable plot that has a shy teenager, living in a tiny village in the Northwest, and falling in love with the most enigmatic boy in school who also happens to be a one hundred yea- old vampire? Yes, Stephanie Mayer was a newbie in the writing craft and yet she scored a home run with Twilight.

The love story of Bella and Edward was not only a first novel but (and it was clear by its open ending) part of a series as well. Don´t they say that first novels that are part of a series are not welcome by agents and publishers? Those who believed in that clause were the twenty publishers (some say they were sixty!) that turned down Susan K. Rowling’s manuscript. They are still kicking themselves for missing the chance to publish Harry Potter and the Philosopher´s Stone!

I left the juiciest tidbit for dessert. The Historian was a first novel that came out with such buzz that a couple of publishing houses bid for it believing the novel to be the next Da Vinci Code. Little Brown eventually paid 2 million dollars to the author, Elisabeth Kostova, who even won an award when The Historian was still in progress.

So novice writers have plenty of reason to dream, won´t you agree? And the best example is Rosslyn Elliot, whose interview, may be read in this same blog. Her first novel landed her a three book contract, despite the fact that she delves into a complex and uncommon genre.

Do you know any other first novels that went on to become bestsellers? Do you still think a first novel has fewer chances if it is part of a series or if the author post chapters on the Internet?