Let’s look at the quick math on word counts as books.
50,000 words is not enough in most genres. It’s a start.
Most fiction genres for adults run 80,000 to 100,000 words. The safest bet is to plan for 80,000 to 89,000 words for your adult novel.
If you’re writing a middle grade or young adult novel, then the 50,000 word count is excellent. You’re there.
So, let’s look at pacing.
Pacing is how we structure our novels. Normally, you can kind of ballpark where things go by simple math. A spreadsheet is an excellent way to do this.
Since 80,000 is a good goal to shoot for across the board, we’ll assume that’s your book.
The first thing to target is Act 2. Act two is always roughly half your word count. This puts act 2 at 40,000 words.
Acts 1 and 3 are half of act 2 – 20,000 words.
I split my novels into 7 chapters for acts 1 & 3, 14 chapters for act 2. That puts you around 2,857 words per chapter.
If you add three scenes per chapter, then that’s 952 words per scene average. Some scenes will be much lower word counts to get the pacing faster. Others will require more words because they’re confrontational scenes.
It’s a safe bet that if you plan this, you’ll come out close to correct every time. The final key is – does it feel like you’re going to the reveal of each plot point too quickly, or too late? This is the visceral part of writing as opposed to the cerebral.
If a plot point happens at the right time, it furthers the pacing, and makes the book seem interesting. Too soon, the book feels rushed. Too late, and the book feels like it’s boring.
Judicious editing – and sometimes the elimination of a plot point – is the key. The ability of Scrivener to drag a scene anywhere in the book can also help. You may sometimes find your book needs to have a particular plot point moved earlier or later than you planned it to give it a flow that FEELS better – it just means some savaage rewriting of scenes.
Of the 60 plot points in your book, again, we split them up to 20 of them in Act 1, 20 in Act 3, and 40 in act 2.
Here’s where it gets funky. You often end up combining plot points. I know I did that in “Blazing Glory”, where I’d often start writing a scene, and the next thing I knew I’d combined several key plot points in one scene – leaving me grasping for ideas in the middle of NaNoWriMo.
Other plot points I’d get to and think, “the feel of the book makes this plot point ridiculous”. Don’t be afraid to ditch a plot point! Hanging onto a plot point that seems redundant or makes the book suddenly contradictory or ridiculous is useless. Cut everything that you find makes the book less powerful.
As you write, you’re going to find that your editing cuts the book word count. Proper fleshing out often fixes that. For imstance, we’re going to have an entire edit to remove filter words – this step ALWAYS adds words! To get the information you need into the story, your shortcuts have to be removed, because those shortcuts always make your book weak and amateurish.
December is the month we spend fleshing out and filling our novel to it’s genre specific word count.
Get started.
