Critical Death Theory, first draft: 65,200 words
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). At bottom, NaNoWriMo is a challenge/incentive to get people to buckle down and write that novel: 50,000 words in 30 days. It is not easy but, as I write this, thousands and thousands of people all over the world are attempting to do just that, and good luck to them!
Now, that said, as longtime readers of this blog will know, NaNoWriMo is something I prefer to admire from afar. I reckon it would take about four hours of my day every day to hit the NaNoWriMo target. That is too much for my personal wellbeing. I have a day job and a family I would like to still have in December. I have been known, however, to crash NaNoWriMo group events in libraries and the like. It’s kinda fun to write surrounded by a bunch of like-minded (albeit tougher) people trying their very best to get a decent novel onto the page. Plus, there is free tea and coffee.
The thing I find slightly jarring about NaNoWriMo, though, is not the difficulty of the target but the assumption (refuted, admittedly, in the fine print) that 50,000 words is a novel. That might have been true when NaNoWriMo started but it is certainly not true today – unless you’re writing for middle grade or younger. There is an excellent Writer’s Digest article by Chuck Sambuchino on the subject of how long novels should be. For adults, Chuck’s range runs from 70,000 to 110,000 words depending on genre. This partly explains why my first attempt at a novel, a middle grade sci-fi adventure, did not get picked up. It ran to almost 120,000 words which, for reasons I can’t fully explain, seemed to me to be the right length for a book. Any book.
It is also possible [sound of gritting teeth] that my first attempt was not very good. Maybe with a bit of editing . . .???
By the time I got around to writing my fourth manuscript, the one that turned into Braking Day, I was a bit more savvy about word count. Science fiction requires a lot of what is called world building, because the environment the characters inhabit needs to be explained to the reader. If a character gets off a plane in Paris, France, most readers will have a decent idea of what just happened. But what if you step through a Lenz portal to Aldebaran Station? What the heck is going on? The reader needs to know! This need to explain the characters’ world in greater detail means you need more words to get your plot to the same place as a romance, say, or a thriller. As a result, SF (and fantasy) novels tend to run long, so, by the rule of Chuck, 100-110,000 words is OK. Knowing this, the draft of Braking Day that went out on submission to agents came in at 109,000 words.
Which was great. The manuscript got picked up (so few words for such a giant, life-changing event!) and the first thing my agent and then my editor asked for was . . . more words. By the time Braking Day reached the shelves it was 130,000 words long. In the terminology of the industry, I had written an “epic.” Adam Oyebanji, epic author. I can live with that!
A Quiet Teacher, my next novel, was not science fiction. It’s a mystery, and very firmly set in the “real” world. Mysteries, particularly fair-play ones like A Quiet Teacher, come in at the opposite end of the scale, mostly for the simple reason that there are only so many clues you can plant in a story before the mystery ceases to be one. Chuck’s view is that 70,000 to 90,000 is about right.
The problem, though, was that my original draft of AQT was barely 65,000 words. Then I decided it wasn’t really a problem. First, that was the “natural” length of the story I had written and, second, rounded to the nearest 10,000 words (there’s no law against this as far as I’m aware) it’s as close to 70,000 as makes no difference. So, I sent it out and my agent and editor asked for – you guessed it – more words. The final, published version comes in at 68,000. Not 70,000, to be sure, but near enough.
Why am I boring you with all this? Well, as of yesterday, the first draft of Critical Death Theory passed the 65,000-word mark. I have written enough to make it into a novel! I always worry, as the word count creeps up from zero, that I don’t have enough for a full-length book. Sixty-five thousand is, in my head, a minimum safe distance from the starting point. I can stop worrying about whether I can write a whole book and concentrate on whether said book is any good.
Which is a problem for the second draft.