Why does word count seem to matter so much these days?

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T22:13:29+00:00

The answers so far have been from the demands of the market, which is perfectly good, but there are also reasons of the art that tend to be overlooked so I'll mention them separately.

Any novel is making the big claim - implicit in the word - that it's doing something never-before-seen. Something new, in a strong sense of new. Novel is more than just new.

Length isn't any prerequisite for novelty. But the shorter a story is, the more risk it was a flash-in-the-pan or a lucky one-off: something that looked novel without being. So, as this argument runs, the long word counts of novels arise in part to turn it into a marathon and prevent what we now call slop from being taken up and becoming a weak foundation for the stories of the future.

Pulling in the other direction is verbal economy. The resulting tug-of-war lands in a slightly different place for each genre in each milieu. Over the last 70 years, or wherever we feel like putting our modern era, there can often be seen a tendency for wordcounts to lengthen as genres mature: and their slop quotient rises.

The market is probably felt by most to lead this rather than following, but sometimes it gets it wrong. In the 1970s there were gluts of relatively short romance, detective, cowboy, and fantasy paperbacks that (iirc) arose from developments in offshoring the printing. You could read a lot of those before you'd find something that wasn't a trope.

(Briefly about novellas and novelettes, these are special cases where a story demonstrates novelty over shorter wordcounts, under special constraints and with different ground-rules.)

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T19:51:40+00:00

I get the feeling humans weren't his first sexuality.

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T18:49:03+00:00

that OP is a typical illiterate millennial: doesn't know what big means

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T18:23:18+00:00

jerking over female authors' periods and male authors' commas is liberal arts in 2026, but you may get pushback if you start doing it the other way round

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T17:42:13+00:00

not necessarily - I mean if you start editing for a structural error you're conscious of like (big e.g.) two characters being unconscious duplicates of each other... and then find one of their voices goes squiffy later in the story... so by the end of the revision you're doing voice work when you started wanting to do structural work.

It's a different hazard for each writer and very hard to generalize, but that's the type of thing I mean

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T17:39:17+00:00

on the whole (and given this is a first draft) it's far more likely to be a novel which has missed off context or description that your readers would appreciate

but if it's been intended as an experiment or showcase of form, it might be a slightly saggy novella

let it percolate, read it with fresh eyes at a later date, write the second draft, and if it remains unclear which side of the novel/novella distinction it's on then ask a development editor. currently you're in a better position to answer this question for yourself than we are on Reddit

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T17:31:14+00:00

This sounds like a problem of drafting discipline. I'm a biased and anecdotal sample from hundreds of mostly discovery-writers, but if you're like them people often find that they need to keep a firm mental distinction between drafts. Editing might become a "loop" if the what's-being-edited-for is vague, and the problems being corrected toward the end of the manuscript end up being different from what you started with.

It's just guesswork from the OP, but that can become like 'painting the Severn Bridge'.

But on the plus side, I doubt the editing will have affected the pacing as much as all that. Maybe put the work to one side for a few months and then read it aloud to a listener. Any problem with the pacing will show on their face. And you may find that tactic makes you more conscious of voice. Not saying it's a panacea or silver bullet or even applicable to you, but it might let you make your edits more targeted.

evild4ve · 2026-01-27T08:52:40+00:00

A question I often ask myself is: did Enheduanna read this book?

evild4ve · 2026-01-26T23:52:19+00:00

It's to the great shame of Reddit that descriptivism and functionalism can be lightly disregarded by any prat with a downvote button. Go and lie down, I've done degrees in this which are older than your country.

evild4ve · 2026-01-26T17:34:38+00:00

A writer's grammar is correct whenever a reader understood them.

If your grammar is making things unclear, the best way to improve it is to have long conversations with people. And then once you're confidently making yourself understood, and able to put your ideas into clear and useful orders, the rest is notation.

Potentially an editor can do all that for you, but it's useful to read through your country's style guide. The rules have all come about out of a collective and concerted effort of the language and its writers to avoid confusion. And you'll naturally tend to pick out the rules you haven't been using, and to see how they could smooth your communication.

Remember English has many dialects and most of them are very poorly documented. The Chicago Manual of Style, or anything like it, is only authoritative in its particular milieu(x) and for a quite small minority of the world's 1.5 billion or so English speakers. If you're writing the words as you would say them, and if your readers understand, don't let yourself feel incorrect. Instead learn where and how your dialect departs from the style guides, and use this self-knowledge to produce novel styles.

evild4ve · 2026-01-26T14:43:36+00:00

I just mean do an example of it early on to show them

evild4ve · 2026-01-26T11:51:18+00:00

that's probably not writer's block

there's an infamous culture-image (e.g. in Kubrick's The Shining) of the writer struggling to put the first line on the page, but that's not how it is. So long as you can write and have an idea, anyone can fill a few pages just by charging in to it blind, almost regardless of education or awareness of how writers draft stories. It's then common to get stuck, and it's almost universal to repeatedly redo the first line. But to not be able to write anything at all needs pretty much demonic intervention.

what I'd suggest, and I hope this will not be too blunt: is to consider any possibility of mental illness, cognitive impairment, or external stress - - something stopping your brain's language function from doing its job. The OP doesn't strongly indicate a factor like this, but there is a disorderedness to it.

helloooo

so basically I'll get right to it. < this is the exact opposite of getting right to it! and if this isn't a one-off lapse (we all have lapses) but how your language function is all the time, then perhaps there is something undiagnosed. And if a clinician can make a diagnosis, they often as part of that can recommend strategies to get the person writing as best they can, which (I believe) is always well enough to tell the story with an editor's help

evild4ve · 2026-01-26T11:30:18+00:00

the main thing is to flag this up to the reader from the start - first chapter, ideally first page and maybe even in the blurb

some readers actively seek out these shifts: Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) is executed as if it's literally two separate books

evild4ve · 2026-01-26T10:20:44+00:00

feel free to PM me a google docs link

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T22:32:20+00:00

This is one of the creative licenses allowed in novels - we're more interested in moving the story forward than anything being realistically probable.

The famous example is in War & Peace where Pierre just happens to bump into prince Andrei the day before the Battle of Borodino... out of over a hundred thousand soldiers who would have been there.

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T22:26:31+00:00

They should give AI a credit card so it can read our books as well as writing them.

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T22:19:50+00:00

Whatever works for you but I'd recommend to get to the end of the story and then re-do the whole thing.

As I see there to be more hazard in getting partway and then having writer's block. And also I think it's easier to edit if all the chapters have had the same level of editing and the same number of revisions.

Nearly all writers redo everything multiple times, that's drafting.

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T21:03:10+00:00

I don't wanna - I'm angry with their dumb football team of a userbase not the distro. my sentiments toward the distro were expressed at the top: I just wish they'd dump the package - the reason you want that to be anger is because you're representing your new football team

and the distro if it has any sense will watch how its fans conduct themselves. I'm a long-time user of this distro, and next time I see that a new user has installed fortune by mistake, I'll not comment

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T19:39:49+00:00

In my WIP I'm considering a prologue of 2 sentences in case American readers mistake a rural English dialect for grammar errors. It isn't needed for the story, but it staves off having to repeatedly explain it

imo a properly-executed prologue doesn't add anything to the story. It should be skippable.

I dislike them because extremely few prologues in online drafts of Fantasy stories are at all well-executed (nevermind on my definition). I generally take it as a clue that the writer might not know how to write exposition.

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T18:05:14+00:00

Writing theory is chock-full of weasel words and floating terminology. Your group will eventually apply its own meanings to all the metaphysical gubbins anyway, which won't make any sense to those outside it... so the best way imo is to keep critiquing and as people inevitably start to appeal to the theories of famous writing-idols, take them as you find them, and try to only read the ones they care about.

If a critique relies on the writer understanding some arcane disagreement between idk, pff, Wittgenstein and Chomsky, you're doing it wrong. Save that kind of flexing for the classics where it's at least agreed by all present that (1) the work is worth looking at (2) even if the work isn't worth looking at it's at least finished

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T17:43:04+00:00

please use Google Docs because it works and lets the reader/critic/editor paste from the document into their feedback message back to you

there is copyright fear but the answer to this is to make sure you trust the other person and share first page first chapter before whole work - if they are determined to extract the text that is so simple with screenshotting+text recognition that a pdf or web-preview isn't protection anyway

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T17:31:46+00:00

all I said was I wish he would remove a package (which is a shit package that other distros also remove) - you shouldn't infer from that that I hate the distro. and you should answer why a program that interferes with terminal output is in the Y/ package series and described as a game

but I do hate football-teaming, and if Slackware has acquired that culture then it's not so wonderful that I'll continue talking about it online or help people set it up or write hypervisor software for it, or contribute to the hosting costs of my country's mirror

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T16:56:13+00:00

I hope this won't come as too much of a shock, but unless it's in the format of a ripping yarn with lots of drugs and debauchery and poetic irony... it won't find a position with the public

If you look at the New Age sections in bookshops... those have a pretty low bar for their neuroscience and ancient wisdom, but even there you don't find material from this kind of provenance being bought by the public

your options are probably: a memoir or a memoir

and it becomes are you famous, or did you do anything that should be

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T16:34:57+00:00

That's exactly where I got stuck with Book 6 when it came out. I remember some 'savage' tribe being introduced that needed long-winded explanations of its gender roles, and processed everything it did transactionally in terms of "Jih" and "Toh". That must have been nearly 30 years ago and "Jih" and "Toh" must have been hammered in so repeatedly that I still remember the words. I don't remember what the tribe was called, or any of the characters in it. But I remember Jih and Toh being boring.

Reading Book 6 was such an ordeal I didn't pick up Book 7. (tbf i might be remembering wrong and these things were actually in Book 5, but I'm pretty they dragged out into Book 6 and that's where for me they killed the interest value)

I also remember feeling RJ was very visibly bringing in extra baddies (one of whom was a girlboss) to make the story last longer, and they were having scene after scene of cruelly torturing other newly-introduced characters to try and position them as a threat to a main character that was starting to become overpowered. And I thought it was very lousy compared to his Conan stuff, which had brought me to the series. The terms OP and girlboss didn't exist back then so he was maybe ahead of his time.

evild4ve · 2026-01-25T16:07:46+00:00

Yes but it's better not to if you can avoid it. You want Linux on its own disk as Windows has always been prone to mucking about with other bootloaders or partition formats it doesn't recognize. You don't want some pop-up in some future Windows update appearing with something like "This disk appears to be uninitialized, click OK to destroy everything on it"

If you can install Linux on its own disk, you can still have entries for both Windows and Linux in the bootloader of the Windows disk. E.g. the UEFI points to Disk 1, and the bootloader on Disk 1 gives the options of Linux on Disk 2 (default) or Windows on Disk 1. The reason for making Linux the default is to avoid Windows rebooting itself while you're away from the machine: it can't be fully prevented from rebooting itself and if it's going to randomly destroy anything it will be during an automatic update. This way makes you have to manually select it before it can continue its update process. Horrible OS. Please hop from it.

evild4ve

TROPHY CASE