The Third Screw Up

Of all the screwups, this one is my least favorite.  For all you novelists out there, this is not going to be news.  For everyone else, please know that bringing this up brings me no pleasure.  Remember that I was once a lowly writer who wanted to be a novelist... so, yes, the thing I am going to mention has happened to me.

Sometimes, someone tells me they've written a novel and they ask me to have a look at it.  They send over the electronic file and I open it.  Before I read any of the text, I check the word count because I'm concerned about this problem.

It's 15,000 words.

I write the author back and ask them where the rest of it is, hoping that there's more they haven't sent me for some reason.

There isn't more.  That's all of it.

Then I have the very non-fun job of informing them that their novel is not a novel.  It's a short story.

The author is confused.  There are chapters.  There are over twenty of them.

I get to explain that it doesn't matter that they cut their writing into chapters.  It's still not a novel.  To help explain, I start at the beginning.  500 - 20,000 words is a short story.  20,000 words to 40,000 words is a novella.  40,000 words to 60,000 words is a lazy man's novel (a lot of Harlequins are written in this range).  60,000 - 100,000 is a perfectly respectable novel with the sweet spot being at approximately 86,000 words.  100,000+ is for high fantasy authors who have really decent publishing companies backing them.  Independent authors can't market books of that length.  The word count is too large and there ends up being too much paper involved in the production of the book for it to be profitable. 

The author is embarrassed because they thought they'd written a novel.  Not only that but cracking out those 15,000 words was really hard for them.  I know.  Like I said, I've had this happen to me as well.

Getting past this problem requires a two-prong strategy.

First, you should think about the fire in your belly.  That fire inside you needs to burn long and hot.  Basically, this means that you have to angry.  You need to feel like books and their authors have let you down.  You need to want to make something different than anybody else.  If all you want to do is write the sorts of things you enjoy reading, you may not have enough fire to power your dream.  You need to believe that you have something to offer than no one else does, that your contribution to the writing world is INDISPENSABLE.  You need to be on fire.  If you feel this way, this setback will be nothing more than a blip and you'll soon pass over any embarrassment you felt writing a short story and trying to pass it off as a novel.

The second thing to note is that you are only at the beginning of your journey.  I'm an old hag and as an old hag, who has been doing this for twenty-five years, I can tell you, you're going to get better.  Things will flow better as you get more practice.  I can write 15,000 words in a day if I'm left alone to do it.  What was once rough will become smooth.