bridgetcoila asked in comments here:Do you generally have an idea of how long something will be when you start writing it?
It's an interesting question. The answer, to some degree, is related to the concept of "span of control" which I've previously discussed on a number of occasions. That is to say, in my admittedly subjective experience every story has a natural size.
That natural size arises from a number of factors, and can be deliberately distorted for reasons of muse or craft, but I think it always underlies the text. Some of this has to do with the structure of the idea. So, for example, consider the following:
| Flash fiction | up to 1,000 words | Typically deals with a single aspect of character, setting or plot, highly economical prose |
| Short story | 1,000 to 7,500 words | One or two point of view characters, moderately realized setting, a single plot arc, tight prose |
| Novelette | 7,500 to 17,500 words | Detailed or multiple point of view characters, detailed or multiple settings, more than one plot arc, tight prose |
| Novella | 17,500 to 40,000 words | Detailed or multiple point of view characters, detailed or multiple settings, multiple complex plot arcs, expansive prose |
These are at best rough approximations the story lengths and their characterizations, but they do express a sense of natural size — in other words, the general richness and complexity of the idea going in gives me pretty significant hints about how long the story (or novel) will be.
For what it's worth, I also find there are "golden lengths" for certain types of stories. I have no idea if this is broadly true, but it seems to apply in much of my own work.
| Short story | 4,000 to 6,000 words |
| Novelette | 10,000 to 12,000 words |
| Novella | 18,000 to 22,000 words |
Note that I frequently violate the above considerations of length and complexity, even in my own work. For example, my SFnal short story "The Cleansing Fire of God", a 4,500 word alternate history space race with heavy religious and political overtones, was described by my first readers as an entire novel jammed into very few words. The story completely overruns the above matrix. It's dense.
Contrast that with "The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black", another SFnal short story which at 4,200 words is about man sitting in a room with a paintbrush in his hand. There's very little character development, only two pieces of action in the whole plot, and the story hinges on a simple decision. Structurally, this one could have been written as flash. Yet it's one of my most popular and successful short stories. And the story falls short of the above matrix by most measures.
Another way I think about story sizing is market requirement. If I'm asked to submit a 4,000 word short story, my first draft will typically be 3,800 to 4,200 words long. That's a span of control effect (per my comment at the head of the post), and definitely a learned behavior on my part. But it's very useful, as it ensures I'm doing the right work for the right market, without wasting effort or undershooting.
And sometimes I'm just flat wrong. I've occasionally embarked on short stories and written novellas. Likewise, I was rather notably wrong on the first draft of Endurance, which fell almost 30% shorter than I expected it to, missing that initial mark by 40,000 words.
The tension here is between muse and craft. That's a dynamic tension, not a destructive one. Almost all consistent commercial writers (and I very much include myself in this category) have achieved a pattern of craft that grants considerable conscious control over the writing process. The muse drives the idea and the voice that make that process come alive and become engaging. Sometimes the muse gets out of its cage and rampages across the page. Those are often the most difficult and interesting stories, but also the most unpredictable.
The arc of my career has been the slow fusion of muse and craft. One of the best signifiers of this is my ability to (usually) predict the length of a piece of fiction just as I start writing it.
Your thoughts?
ETA: Important note. As with all my analyses of process and the craft of writing, this is post-facto. When I'm approaching a text in initial draft, it's just words on a page. None of this sort of thing is consciously in my head, at least not after an initial decision as to what sort of piece I'm writing — ie, flash, novelette, novel. I very strongly believe it to be a mistake to overplan work before the words hit the page. This thinking can be very useful on revision, or for contemplation of the writing process as a general rule, but for me at least, it poisons the draft to self-consciously write.
| Originally published at jlake.com. |