Last year I wrote a beautiful novel. I had a detailed outline and I wrote the novel out of order, so I had absolutely no idea how long it would be until I finished. It was, um. thirty-eight thousand words. I don’t know if you know this (of course you do) but novels are more like sixty to eighty thousand words; young adult (which this one is) can be on the shorter side, but the current trend is longer and certainly nothing is getting traditionally published at under fifty thousand words, let alone under forty thousand.
And yeah, okay, I tend to write short drafts (I’m a flash fiction author at heart), but this was awfully short. It was a novella and I knew I could write novels. I had already written one the year before, a contemporary retelling of The Three Musketeers that had a fifty-one thousand word first draft and came out at just a hair under sixty thousand after revision. I couldn’t understand what had happened this time until it finally dawned on me: I had quite simply forgotten about B plots. I literally forgot they exist. Was it because The Three Musketeers doesn’t have a B plot so much as it has a whole lot of shit going on all at once? I don’t know. It didn’t really matter — the only book I was writing was this one, and it was too short. I was…frustrated, to say the least.
I decided at the beginning of this year, while I took a break from my novel, that I was going to let myself write the shortest version of any given idea; I wasn’t going to push myself to make anything longer. In fact, with shorter work, I would aim for the shortest possible version. Why write a short story when I could write flash? Why write flash when I could write a poem?
This worked great…until it stopped working.
I wrote a seven-hundred word flash that was utterly perfect, and all I wanted to do was expand it into a longer story. So I did! It ended up being over five thousand words. It dawned on me then that I am not the boss of my word count; my word count is the boss of me.
I shouldn't have been surprised! I had written another story not too long before that I expected to be around six thousand words, maybe ten thousand max, and it ended up being over fifteen thousand. This summer I wrote a story I thought would be about the same length as that one, maybe as much as twenty thousand, and it came out to thirty-six thousand. THIRTY SIX! That’s almost as long as the too-short novel draft!
It’s time I came to terms with it: I have absolutely no control over what length my stories end up. I don’t mind it so much. I believe it will be okay. Somehow.
Now, back to that B plot.
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