The other day a writer I mentored for the Horror
Writers Association emailed to ask for advice on how to make novels longer. I
thought, “Wow, that’s not a topic I can address in an email. It would
make for an excellent blog post, though.”
So here we are.
Fiction writers tend to come in two varieties: Those
inclined to write short, and those inclined to write long. The shorties often
have to keep adding material, especially if they’re trying to write a novel,
while the longies write a bunch and then have to cut it down to the right size.
Before we go any farther, let me say this: It’s okay to be a short-writer or a
long-writer, and you don’t have to try to make yourself into the opposite if
you don’t want to. Some writers predominately write short fiction throughout
their careers, while others focus on writing novels. When I started out forty
years ago with a goal of becoming a professional author, I was most comfortable
with the novel form. I finished my first novel at 19, and it came to around
72,000 words. But I wanted to learn how to write short fiction so I could
master all the skills of a fiction writer. But that’s me. You do you. But if
you want to write novels and you struggle to create enough material to fill an
entire book, I’ve got some tips that will hopefully help you out.
So how long is a novel? In general, traditional
publishers consider a novel to be at least 50,000 words, but they’re more often
looking for lengths between 80,000 to 120,000 words. If you self-publish
ebooks, however, your novels could be as long or as short as you want, as the
physical size of the book – and the cost to produce it – is no longer a factor.
My novels tend to run around 82K to 90K. That’s a natural range for me, and
business-wise, I don’t get a larger advance for writing more words than the
minimum. Why would I write 120K words if I’m going to get the same advance for
writing 80K? Sometimes I do write more, especially when the story seems to
demand it, but not often.
Young adult novels tend to run between 25K to 50K
words, and middle-grade novels from 10K TO 30K. My most recent middle-grade
novel, I Scream, You Scream, is about 30,000 words. (This book still
hasn’t found a publisher yet, so don’t head over to Amazon and wonder why you
can’t find it.) My recently-released novel We Will Rise is around 90K
words, and the novel I just finished and turned in to my editor at Aethon
Books, The Atrocity Engine, runs slightly more than 100,000 words. Most
of the tie-in publishers I’ve worked with wanted lengths of around 80K from me.
Now for some advice . . .
1) Aim
for the Bare Minimum. If you’re having trouble reaching novel
length, I’d advise you to start off aiming for the shorter end of the spectrum.
This is one of the reasons the goal for National Novel Writing Month is 50K
words. It’s the shortest novel length you can write that isn’t YA or MG. Fifty
thousand words isn’t a marketable length in terms of traditional publishing,
but some small press publishers might be okay with it, if you’re
self-publishing, shorter novels tend to work better anyway. (Shorter but more
frequent releases seems to be the most successful business model for
self-publishing.) Breaking 50K on a manuscript for the first time can help you
overcome the psychological hurdle of writing a novel. For a lot of beginning
novelists, the novel form can seem too intimidating. But once you’ve hit 50K,
you’ve gotten over the first big psychological hurdle, and you can try to write
a longer novel next time.
2) A
short story is an event; a novel is a series of events that add up to a much
larger journey. If the length of a novel seems
intimidating, don’t think of your story as a novel, but rather a series of
connected short stories. For example, if you’re writing a novel about a
haunting, one scene might be the story of the first time your main character
suspects there’s a ghost. Another scene might be the story of how the ghost
came to be in the first place. Another scene might be the story of the ghost’s
first attempt to kill your main character or perhaps possess them. You can
write these stories in any order you want and combine them later. Using this
technique, your novel is almost like a short story collection where all the
stories are linked and they add up to a plot progression from beginning to end.
And if you need to write some connecting scenes so the stories fit together
better, so be it. And if you’ve already got a novel draft finished but it’s too
short, ask yourself if there are any other small stories related to the overall
story that you haven’t told yet, then tell them. For example, maybe the
haunting in your novel has been going on for two centuries. This means other
people than your main character have encountered the ghost. Why not tell their
stories in your book?
3) Add
more characters. One of the ways I get length into my
novels is to use an ensemble cast. This means I can write scenes from different
characters’ viewpoints, and it allows me to show different aspects of the
story. I try to keep the number of characters in the ensemble manageable,
around ten or less, with three to five main ones. Sometimes I’ll fall in a love
with a character who was originally supposed to have only a few scenes or who was
even supposed to die. But I see possibilities for expanding the story with
them, so I keep them around. Sometimes I’ll introduce a character later in the
narrative who’s only going to stick around for a while (maybe they’re going to
be killed by the antagonist) but I’ll write a scene of two from their point of
view. I want to give them their moment on the stage, give them their dignity,
before they have to bow out.
4) Add
more obstacles. One of the easiest ways to make a novel
longer is to give your characters more hurdles to overcome. On the way home
from teaching at my college today, I was listening to an audiobook, a fantasy
adventure story. The characters were traveling on foot attempting to sneak past
an enemy army at night. Now they could’ve gotten past without incident, but
what fun is that for readers? They got noticed by the army, were chased, and
got separated. Two had to jump off a cliff into a river, and two others had to disguise
themselves and attempt to pass through the army to get to a castle of potential
allies under siege. It wasn’t easy, but they all managed to eventually meet
back up inside the castle, relatively safe (one of them caught an arrow in the
shoulder). The author could’ve simply had the characters all get from point A
to point B without trouble, but by making it harder for them, not only did the
author make that part of the story more interesting, he made it longer.
5) Use
the Triangle Technique. Many writers try to create novels
using only two points of conflict. Let’s use the movie Jaws as an
example. Two points of conflict: Sherriff vs Shark. But now consider three
points of conflict: Sheriff vs Shark and Mayor who wants to keep the beach open
during 4th of July holiday weekend at all costs. The novel Jaws has a
fourth point of conflict. The oceanographer Hooper dated the Sheriff’s wife in
college and they begin an affair. Adding extra points of conflict not only
makes your story richer and gives it more depth, it allows you to regulate the
pace of your novel by switching back forth between the points of conflict, and
it allows you to make your story – you guessed it! – longer.
6) Employ
Murphy’s Law. A lot of beginning writers have almost
everything go right for their characters. The characters may have some kind of
obstacle to overcome to get from point A to point B, but they will get to Point
B, usually unscathed (more or less). For example, say you have a scene where a
character needs to get to a job interview, and they’re running late. Maybe they
almost get involved in a car accident but manage to get there at last. But what
if they don’t get to the interview? What if something occurs that
completely sidetracks them? They get into an accident. Or someone runs up to
them at a stoplight and begs for their help. Having something go truly wrong in
a scene can send the story off into interesting and unexpected directions – and
lengthen your novel in the process. Some books on novel plotting call this a
Disaster, as in scenes should always end with something going wrong, whether
large or small. I think that approach is too mechanical and could quickly
become repetitious, but the basic concept is sound.
7) Combine
story types to develop your novel further. There are many
different story motifs, and one way to make a story larger is to combine them.
Stereotypical action movies do this well (because the action in and of itself
isn’t enough to carry an entire film). Let’s say the main thing our
action-adventure hero needs to do is stop vampires from releasing a
genetically-modified virus that will lower humanity’s collective IQ to the
point where they’re no smarter than cattle (thus making it easier to control
them and use them as a food source). If our hero knew all this, though, it
would make it too easy to locate the vampires and stop them. So we add a
Mystery element. Why are formerly brilliant people turning up on the street
with low IQ’s? Why are there mysterious murders where the victims die of
blood-loss? And so on. That’s still not enough, though, so let’s add a Love
story. A scientist who’s looking into the mysterious low IQ’s gets threatened
by a mysterious assailant (who we’ll later learn is a vampire) and our hero
ends up saving them and starts for fall for them. Maybe we’ll add a Chase too.
The vampires are desperate to get their hands on the scientist. They manage to
abduct them and the hero goes after them. Now we’ve got a Rescue, too! So if
your novel is too short, add in one or more story types. Following are a few
different story types to choose from. I’m sure you can think of more.
·
Chase
·
Love
·
Rescue
·
Revenge
·
Coming of age
·
Discovery
·
Quest for object
·
Quest for truth
·
Survival
·
Escape
·
Defense/protection
8) Stories
within stories. At the start of this blog entry, I talked
about how you can think of a novel as a series of stories, and how you can
expand your novel by adding more stories. Here are few specific types to choose
from.
·
Flashbacks: You can show a great deal
about characters and setting by adding dramatized flashbacks. Just don’t overdo
it and have every other scene be a flashback. And if you have more than one,
space them out. And try different techniques. One flashback could be a memory,
one could essentially be a monologue as a character tells their story to
another character, one could be a separate dramatized scene that you insert
without any explanation where it came from (readers will understand you’re
simply showing them something from the past), or you could present it as a
dream (which means you can add surreal touches to it here and there, maybe
combine it with another memory, or turn it into a nightmare). And speaking of
dreams . . .
·
Dreams: Other ways dreams can be used are
as a portent of the future (whether the character’s dream is magic or psychic
in nature) or as a reaching into the past (again, via magic or science). You
can also have bits and pieces of these dreams – or psychic episodes – occur
periodically throughout the book, keeping the mystery of what it all means
until later, when all the puzzle pieces are in place. You can have characters
communicate in dreams. This could be two living people or it could be a living
person and a dead person, or people connecting across time or dimensions. It
all depends on the kind of story you’re telling.
·
Imaginings: This is the Walter Mitty
technique. One of your characters can imagine a dramatized scenario – maybe one
they’ve been dreading or one they hope will happen. They can try to imagine something that
happened in the past. These scenes may be short – anywhere from a few
paragraphs to pages – but when you’re trying to expand your novel, every little
bit helps.
·
Hallucinations: Your character might be
under the influence of some supernatural force or they might be sick, injured,
drugged or suffering from some sort of mental illness. Any of these could cause
your character to experience a dramatized scene that may not be real, but it’ll
show more about them and, depending on how you write the hallucination, even
advance the plot. And if your character (or characters) experience periodic
hallucinations, so much the better.
·
Origin stories. Say you have a character
that has a deathly fear of drowning. Instead of telling readers about it in a
short summary paragraph, you could write a dramatized flashback showing the
origin of this fear. Maybe you’re writing a science fiction novel in which a
space colony has for some mysterious reason become deserted. You can alternate
between scenes of the current investigation into the disappearances with past
scenes of the colonists experiencing the events that lead to their eventual
disappearance. (This alternating between past and present storylines can work
well for short fiction too.) You can tell the origin of a people, a
civilization, a technology, a curse . . . anything, really, just so long as
it’s pertinent to the story and above all, interesting to the reader.
·
A supporting character’s story: Have an
important supporting character? Tell their story, either all at once or in bits
and pieces, but tell it in a dramatized scene.
·
Use epistolary techniques: Epistolary
techniques – making a novel be a collage of documents written the characters –
used to be a common storytelling techniqye. It’s still around today, but most
people probably know if as found-footage movies. You can use diary/journal
entries, excerpts from a fictional book in your world, letters, emails, new
articles, web articles, TV news, recorded videos, security footage, records of scientific
experiments, etc. Putting excerpts from these things in your novel can enrich
it by adding some narrative variety, as well as additional length.
9) Additional
expansion tips.
·
Have your characters work at cross
purposes: Too many writers have all of their characters working well together
the entire time, with perhaps a token argument here and there, but nothing so
serious that disrupts the group’s forward progress. But you lengthen your story
(and add additional conflict and character development) by having your
characters argue about the best way to deal with a problem, or having them go
their own way to address the problem because they can’t agree on strategy.
Maybe your characters have different goals (and maybe they’re concealing their
true motives). Having your characters work at cross purposes also complicates
your plot, which . . . yep, makes the story longer.
·
Twist in the middle: A lot writers save a
plot twist for the end of the story, but what good does it do then? The story’s
over. But if you include a twist in the middle, it can send your story
off in some interesting directions, and make your story longer, especially if
the twist is something that plays itself out after a while. What if one of your
characters is revealed to have stolen someone else’s identity and in reality,
they’re a criminal? Your other characters will no longer trust them once they
discover this secret, and additional complications might ensue, such as the
police coming to arrest the character or maybe some of their former criminal
associates showing up to collect an unpaid debt. These complications are eventually
dealt with, the other characters get over their distrust of the deceptive
character (maybe by learning their backstory, as I mentioned earlier) and then everyone
gets back to the regularly scheduled plot and the story moves on from there.
·
Sidetracks: One of the earliest tie-in
novels I wrote was a young adult Dragonlance novel for Wizards of the Coast
called Temple of the Dragonslayer. This was the first YA novel WotC
produced, and after I turned in my draft, my editor contacted me and said, “I
know we told you we wanted 40,000 words, but we’ve decided the book should be
50,000 words.” So I had to add another 10K words, but I wanted to avoid
significant rewriting. I needed 10K words of story that I could drop into the novel
somewhere without changing anything before or after it. My heroes were
traveling to a valley where the temple mentioned in the title was located, and
in the original version, they reach the edge of the valley (after a long and
hazardous journey), look down upon the temple with relief, and head down toward
it. For my extra 10K words, I decided to have one of the characters be
kidnapped by goblins and dragged down into their subterranean lair. Then I had
the other characters go in search of her. (Basically, I added a mini-Rescue
story.) I wanted to make this sequence important to the overall book, so I
decided to make it an explanation for why goblins always seem to pop up out of
nowhere in D&D campaigns. They travel through a series of underground
tunnels, come up, cause their mischief, then escape back into the tunnels. The
rescue was successful, my characters got back to the edge of the valley, they
took a deep breath, relieved that they could finally head down to the temple,
and started forward again. I’d plopped an additional mini-story into an already
complete draft, but readers had no idea when they read the finished book. I
made the rescue exciting and made it pertinent to the overall story by showing
something about the world. Having characters get sidetracked, maybe for a
lengthy portion of your novel, can work great to add length. It’s a variation
on adding more obstacles, but this is a big one, one that might add several
chapters to your book instead of a few pages.
·
Wrong turns: Even if characters encounter
obstacles on the way toward meeting their goals, beginning writers still have
their characters make right choices along the way. But you can add length to a
novel, and make the story more interesting, if your character makes a mistake
that sends them off in a wrong direction, especially if they don’t know
they’re headed in the wrong direction. Ever seen a movie in which characters
are searching for a treasure, and after deciphering a series of clues, get to
what they think is the location of the treasure, only to find it’s not there
and in reality it’s located at the place where they started their search? The
entire damn story is a wrong turn, sending the characters on an absolutely
unnecessary journey. Unnecessary for them, but maybe quite entertaining to an
audience. Characters should make mistakes, operate under false assumptions,
follow bad (or deceitful) advice on how to proceed, etc.
·
Ask yourself, “What couldn’t possibly
happen next?” then make it happen. This is a piece of advice I share with
aspiring writers all the time. Too often our plots are simple, contrived
things, a subconscious recycling of stories we’ve read or viewed before. Let’s
say one of your characters is going to confront their spouse about having an
affair, and you imagine them having a huge argument that ends with them
deciding to divorce. Nothing especially interesting about that, plus it’s not
that long. So ask yourself what couldn’t possibly – at least in the way you
currently envision the story – happen next, then make it happen. Maybe your
character walks into the house and finds their spouse dead. Maybe they find the
spouse being held hostage by someone they’ve never seen before. Maybe the
spouse isn’t there, and there’s nothing to indicate where they went. Maybe the
spouse’s mother has dropped by for a visit and they can’t have a discussion
about the affair. Or maybe they do have it with the mother, and maybe she’s
the one that unexpectedly starts it. Maybe that’s the moment when an alien race
invades Earth. Whatever. This technique works better in the outline stage if
you’re a plotter, but you can try it anytime in the drafting process if you’re
a pantser. I’m a little of both, but I’m never hesitant to make a sudden swerve
in my story if a good change occurs to me, and I need to make my novel
larger.
So if your novel turns out to be shorter than you (or
your editor) would like, hopefully the tips I’ve given you will help you expand
it. Just remember what I said several times above: Anything you add should be
pertinent to the story and interesting to the reader, not just random words
crammed into your novel only to make it longer. You want your novel to
be both bigger and better.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
We
Will Rise
Release
We
Will Rise,
my ghost apocalypse novel, is finally out from Flame Tree Press! Early reviews
have been good so far. But you don’t have to take my word for it – here’s a
sampling:
“We
Will Rise is a tense, emotional, scary ride and one of Waggoner’s best.” –
Zach Rosenberg, Horror DNA
“The
book is CREEPY. It's devastating and brutal, with parts not for the faint
hearted. It's definitely a horror, and one of my new favourite horrors that's
for sure!” – Melissa
“Such
a fun, horrifying rollercoaster of a book! Once I started, I couldn’t put it
down.” – Sugar Spice Coffee
“From
the first page on Waggoner had me hooked. His imagination is truly off the
charts, and never could I have predicted what would happen next.” – Julia C.
Lewis
If
you read We Will Rise, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d leave a
review/rating somewhere. Reader reviews are the lifeblood of a book, and they
help publishers decide whether to bring out more work from an author.
You
can also hear me read the first scene from the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQWpRmZRAc&t=52s
Synopsis
In Echo Hill, Ohio, the dead begin to reappear,
manifesting in various forms, from classic ghosts and poltergeists, to physical
undead and bizarre apparitions for which there is no name. These malign spirits
attack the living, tormenting and ultimately killing them in order to add more
recruits to their spectral ranks.
A group of survivors come together after the initial
attack, all plagued by different ghostly apparitions of their own. Can they
make it out of Echo Hill alive? And if so, will they still be sane? Or will
they die and join the ranks of the vengeful dead?
Purchase Links
Flame Tree Press
https://www.flametreepublishing.com/we-will-rise-isbn-9781787585249.html
Amazon Paperback
Kindle
Amazon Hardcover
Barnes & Noble Paperback
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-will-rise-tim-waggoner/1140376625?ean=9781787585225
NOOK Book
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-will-rise-tim-waggoner/1140376625?ean=9781787585263
Barnes & Noble Hardcover
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-will-rise-tim-waggoner/1140376625?ean=9781787585249
I
hope you’ll help spread the word about the workbook. Like Writing in the
Dark, I wrote it to help people improve their horror fiction – or if
they’re new to horror, to help them get started in the genre – and I want to
help as many people as I can. You can help me do that. And for those of you
who’ve already spread the word, thank you so much!
Chicon 8: The 80th World Science Fiction
Convention: Chicago, Sept. 1-5.
World Fantasy Convention. New Orleans: Nov. 3-6.
Authorcon 2. Williamsburg, Virgina: March 31-April
2.
Stokercon. Pittsburgh: June 15-18.
Want to stalk me
virtually?
Want
to follow me on social media? Here’s where you can find me:
Website:
www.timwaggoner.com
Twitter:
@timwaggoner
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/tim.waggoner.9
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Blog: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/
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