Yup. There are a lot of words.

Last night we completed our read-through on the music novel. We knew that the latter portion of it would contain a fair amount of misplaced recap, because of the restructuring (the latter portion was originally the early portion, in fact it was originally the whole book, rife with flashbacks). We did find such material, but it doesn’t have as much bulk as we were expecting, so cutting it back isn’t going to have as much of an impact on the Brobdingnagian word count. Furthermore, there’s stuff we still need to add. Hoo boy. It’s looking like this one could flirt with 200k.

But that’s okay. The book will be the right size, based on the story it contains. There are guidelines, but there isn’t a magic number of words that “good” books consist of.

This attitude is a bit of an adjustment for Kent, in particular. He’s tended to be a bit keyed up about not letting things get too big. In this case, it’s just a bigger story, with more world-building required. There’s also a large cast, all of whom have important functions in the narrative. It’s just big, period.

The scale of your book becomes another point on which you need to agree with your partner. If one of you is thinking of it as a novella and the other as a saga, you’ll probably realize early on that more discussion is needed. But once you’ve agreed that what you’re plotting is “a novel,” be careful of miscommunication. That word could describe anything from about sixty thousand words on up. Of course, there’s an upside to a partnership (as always). A writing partner is someone to help get things in perspective. Editing is a lot of work, and cutting clever stuff is especially hard. It’s all too easy to make excuses for keeping too many words, not paring things down (or conversely for not fleshing them out — too few words is not a typical Rune Skelley problem but we can see how it could happen). A good partner will push for doing things right.