Mornin’,
Thought some readers might be curious on how I use word counts – most notably, when writing a book I use the word count to give me a rough progress guage for the work. For novels, I set it to 40k words, and when I hit that I know my work in shaping up into a real book.
How so you set a word count, though?
Well, the rules vary from place to place, but personally, I like the Nebula Award’s rules –
Novel — 40,000 words or more
Novella — 17,500–39,999 words
Novelette — 7,500–17,499 words
Short Story — 7,499 words or fewer
They’re nice, roomy estimates – short stories give you a decent amount of leg room, before you step into a category all your own and start building your world.
Some of these aren’t used all that often – novella isn’t entirely common, but novelette is usually scrapped entirely in favour of using ‘short story’.
Which is a pity, really, because it leads to me reading those long short stories, then looking at my tightly-restricted school assignment short stories and wondering how people get something that long out of the short story mindset. Turns out they’re not really writing short stories at all.
I hope to start writing novelettes soon. =] The longer-short story field is huge and relatively unexplored to me. I wanna be in magazines! =D
Love,
E.Maree
xoxo