From the Mailbag: Novel Length and Other Concerns

L asks:

I was hoping you could give some writing advice, focusing more on the length of the novel. I’ve been working on my story, a YA Fantasy and the problem is that it’s too short. 61,000 words. I’ve been trying to come up with extra scenes to beef it up but so far I’ve had no luck. I want it to be epic and big and emotional. Everything I’ve written tends to fall on the shorter side. How do you get a good length for your books? What do you do if they’re looking too short?

There are several different parts to this question, so let’s take them one at a time:

First part: Ideal length for a YA novel. This is very dependent on the type of novel you are writing, and the current market trends. Look at it this way: ten years ago, you were going to have more of a problem if you were trying to sell a YA novel longer than 50-60k. Shorter was fine and very common, but there was a definite belief in the industry that children were not going to read longer books.

What happened? Harry Potter. And Eragon. And A Great and Terrible Beauty. And Twilight. And the list goes on and on. All of a sudden, publishers realized that when it came to big fat fantasy novels, the readers liked ’em big and fat.

About eight years ago, when I first started getting into YA, almost everywhere you looked for submission guidelines for YA novels, they were still recommending an ideal length of 50-60k. Most of the books I was reading, regardless of genre, were indeed that length.

But that started changing, and by the time I was ready to shop my first YA fantasy novel, I knew we weren’t going to be turned away for it being “too long” because it was over 100,000 words. And we weren’t. No one blinked an eye, because by that point lots and lots of YA fantasy novels were that length.

However, lots of them were shorter, too. to this day, most contemporary YA novels fall into the 60k, range, and some of the spec fic ones do, too. And, L., you are in luck, as 61,000 words is actually an EXCELLENT length for a YA fantasy novel. Here is a list of very popular YA fantasy novels that are in that range:

• Tithe, by Holly Black: 66,000 words
• Blue Bloods, by Melissa De La Cruz: 61,000 words
• Tattoo by Jennifer Lynn Barnes: 56,000 words
• Midnighters: The Secret Hour, by Scott Westerfeld: 64,000 words
• Academy 7, by Anne Osterland: 57,000 words
• The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary E. Pearson: 62,000 words
• Betrayal, by Gillian Shields, 69,000 words
• The Clearing, by Heather Davis: 61,000 words
• Cold Kiss, by Amy Garvey: 62,000 words

Now, some of these were published a while ago (like Midnighters, Tithe, and Tattoo) and some of them were published in the past year, like The Clearing and Cold Kiss. (And honestly, I don’t think I’ve read a Melissa De La Cruz novel longer than 60,000 words, and she’s one of the top names writing YA urban fantasy right now.) So, as you can see, if you start shopping your YA urban fantasy novel at a nice, tight 61,000 words, no publisher will blink an eye at that length.

(By the way, if you’re wondering how I found out the length of these novels, I looked it up here, which is an excellent resource for this kind of thing, though it doesn’t list all novels. I was trying to find Mari Mancusi’s vampire books, since I think they’re pretty short, too.)

Which brings me to my next point:

Second part: It’s more important for your scenes to be useful than for your scenes to be there. You know when you buy a DVD and it includes all kinds of “deleted scenes” from your favorite movies? The reason those things are there is because, after they shot the movie and such, they realized that those scenes, while they may be funny or entertaining or poignant or whatever, didn’t actually do very much to move the story forward. And while they are great fun for the fans to watch, had they been in the original movie, it might have dragged down the plot. How often are you reading a book and thinking to yourself, “Yeah, I get it, just get ON with it?”

That’s why I said the important thing is not that your manuscript is 60k or 100k, it’s that it’s a tight 60k or 100k, with nothing wasted.

To wit: I don’t think it’s a good idea to be trying to write in “extra scenes to beef it up,” if what you are trying to beef up is some arbitrary “length” requirement. Which is not to say that “beefing up” isn’t exactly what you’ll end up doing. I know lots of people who write very short, sparse first drafts, and a lot of their revision process is about going in and expanding their world. My friend Jessica Spotswood was actually just discussing this the other day, about how one of her guiding forces in the revisions for her first novel was to make sure she “ruffled more corsets” and beefed up the description of her alternate Victorian world. If you look at my word count guide on the side, you’ll see the one listed as “PAP” (Codename: Post-apocalyptic Persuasion, i.e., For Darkness Shows the Stars) was targeted at 60,000 words. By the end of my first draft, it was more like 75k, and by the end of my revision process, it was 90k. Because it needed to be.

So, if in the process of your revisions, you find that you need to beef up the scenes you already have with more emotion or more explanations or more setting or etc., then that’s great. If you see, in revisions that you, say, haven’t really established that the heroine is very, very close to her father (this is just a hypothetical, it has NOTHING to do with anything I may or may not be writing at this very minute), then you may choose to write in a new scene of them being together in order to “beef up their relationship.”Or you may choose to, instead of writing new scenes, just looking at the scenes you already have between the two of them and seeing how you can deepen their connection. emotion, relationship, etc. Everybody does this, whether on their own or with the guidance of their critique partners or editor.

(In passing, if you don’t have critique partners, I highly recommend finding them.)

But that’s totally different than trying to write in scenes that don’t necessarily add anything to the story but length. Those need to be cut. For more info on that, see “kill your darlings.”

Which leads me to my final point.

Third part: epic and big and emotional is not a factor of length, but a factor of feel.

By the end of this year, I will have published as many short stories as I have novels. The novels I’ve written have run the length from 55,000 words to 108,000 words (and the shortest of those is an adult novel, so make of that what you will). My short stories run the length from 5,000 words to 15,000 words. And sometimes, epic and emotional stuff happens in those short stories. Families are created, worlds are destroyed, loves are found, magical powers are revealed, lives are saved… I have one short story, 7,500 words long, that every single person who has read it thus far said it made them cry.

Which is good. I wanted it to make them cry. I wanted it to be hugely emotional. But I don’t need 100,000 words to make that happen. I can make it happen in 7,500 words, if they’re the right ones, in the right order, etc. Ever cry at a long-distance phone commercial? How about a picture? How about this?

Epic and emotional doesn’t necessarily require page count. What it requires is that the characters going through the experience they’re going through are having the most epic and emotional experience of their lives, and that the writer makes that abundantly clear to the reader.

In conclusion: 60k is a perfectly cromulent length, don’t add extra scenes just to add extra scenes (but do add extra scenes if it deepens or expands your story), and remember, epic and emotional are weightless qualities. You can do it in two hundred pages, but you might really nail your readers if you do it in two.