I am currently communicating with six other writers. Five of these people have commented on the difficulty they have either deciding what length a fictional work should run, or controlling the size of their inspirational idea as expressed in story form. For me production has not proven a problem. I have though, had my own difficulties with managing the length of my fiction.

As a non-fiction writer I am really geared toward a 20,000 to 50,000 word book; that being the factual expression or exploration of an idea, that falls into novella or short novel range. As a fiction writer, once I hit that 50,000 word mark I began getting manic about the project and either push hard if it is not flowing or get sucked into overdrive if it is.

Overall I find fiction more tiring and requiring of more energy because it is more real, more authentic—the way I do it that is—than most nonfiction. In nonfiction I offer facts and an opinion, maybe two other opinions as well. In fiction I have to explore feelings and subjective opinions objectively. In my opinion the delivery of authentic character perspectives in the context of fiction is the toughest of the writer’s gigs.

Before I go on to address the various fiction lengths according to the guidelines of the Science Fiction Writers of America, let me state that the apparent goal of most writers and publishers in terms of the benchmark work of fiction, the novel, encourages sparse content. For instance, a typical novel will have much less interaction between the protagonist and supporting characters than you would have with the supporting characters of your life over the same period. Also, ideas and concepts will generally be kept at short story level.

A perfect example is Stephan King, who probably sells more than all other fantasy/horror-sci-fi writers combined. King’s success is based on novels converted to movie form, which requires extreme compression, as a movie is really about the content level of a novelette. King solved this dilemma by taking what could have been great short stories and expanding them into novels, so that it might be easily compressed.

Two examples of old time writers who wrote so densely that their work has not, or will not, compress well into movies, are Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance and Robert E. Howard. My fellow reviewer, V.J. Waks recently looked at The Vale of Lost Women by Howard and was aghast at how it was such a waste at short length, having the potential of a novel that would be ideally suited to reduction [my term] into movie form.

Victoria herself may serve as an example, her novel Tau 4 was originally a movie script that some scumbag producer was in the process of stealing. To protect her idea Victoria wrote Tau 4 as a novel, a book ideally suited for conversion into a movie or graphic novel. The follow up novel, Hammerspace is richer, stronger, better, but would—I bet—be tougher to compress into a movie.

The other aspect that I, as sci-fi writer, have to consider is how the audience has changed since the 1970s when I developed my taste for literature. As female readers began coming into the genre in the 1980s books kept getting thicker, the same story told in longer form. Look at the westerns section at the book store and then at romance. The category that appeals to male readers will have novels 40% shorter than the genre targeting female readers. Women like to take their time with a book, men want to finish it. That romance section is also 16 times larger!

Consequently male readers have gravitated to comics and movies to get stories, and video games to get adventure. There is no longer such a thing as a young adventure reader unless he is paging through a comic. Those males left reading novels tend to effeminate literary sensibilities and like the long version novel. Howard or Burroughs could not sell today unless they wrote comic scripts or injected wordy passages to fluff out their books for the ladies. Male readers that remain are likely to gravitate toward novellas, shorts and novelettes. So I have slowed down my novel schedule and am writing at lengths more appealing to the kind of reader that appreciates my kind of content.

I am no expert where fiction length is concerned. What follows is my experience with and impressions of each length I have written in. Each section on a given length will include a brief bibliography of what I have produced thus far at that length. I never pick a word or page target. I strive to come in under the limit for anything south of a novel, and over 50,000 for my novels. I have broken from convention by adding an epic novel length, which I regard as anything over 150,000 words, essentially the length of three Burroughs novels.

A Note on Serials: the free serials on this site are sketched out at novelette, novella, or novel length, by chapter, with the typical serial chapter length at about 1,700 words. These are works in progress, except for First Contact, which is complete. The episodes are mostly short length with a couple vignette-length entries. Note that the page counts are based on files written in various typefaces and sizes. The word count is what matters.

I am trying! I want to be able to grab a fiction reader and leave them with something worthwhile in under 1,000 words. The art of this has eluded me thus far.

The Last Man: 994 words, 3 pages

This is a very comfortable length for me. Most novelist’s, particularly women or those who write for women, struggle here. What they are struggling with is the temptation—nigh the feeling of duty—to fully inform the reader and to give her the closure she craves from a story. That is not what shorts are for. Shorts are to make us wonder, to get us pondering—to slap us across the face. The short is predominantly a thought-provoking male art form.

Ladies, look at it this way. The novelist is a prostitute who greets you in an engaging fashion, wines you, dines you, dances for you, and then has sex with you—a woman’s idea of an escort. A short, by contrast, is the dancer who does not give it up, but just teases the viewer. The short does what the dancer does; leaves the reader wanting more and wondering. To go along with this metaphor, the comic book is therefore the hooker on her knees in an alley.

I like writing my chapters in books as if it were a short, not just a segment of linkage in the yarn. Likewise I like writing a short with the sense that something came before and shall come after. I am far from strong here, but can credit writing shorts with helping my longer work deepen. My serials First Contact and Winter both grew from a short, which became the starting episode after I had requests for more from readers.

Hallowed: 3,202 words, 6 pages

Ever Less, Ever More: 3, 032 words, 7 pages

Summer Moon: 2,212 words, 7 pages

If It Seems the Fates Are Against You: 2, 607 words, 7 pages

This is my best length. I generally write novelettes from a bookmark outline, essentially a table of contents of vignette to short length scenes. I have not attempted a novelette from multiple perspectives, although I would like to one day. A novelette takes from 2 days to 2 weeks. Pacing with such a lineal story line is important, so I only write these when my energy is up.

By This Axe!: 13,882 words, 24 pages

Soter’s Way: 7,993 words, 14 pages

Organa: 14,296 words, 26 pages

Buzz Bunny: 13,789 words, 24 pages

This Design is Called Paisley: 10,846 words, 19 pages

God of War: 11,759 words, 22 pages

Menthol Rampage: 10,020 words, 28 pages

Wake From Your Dream Place: 8, 662 words, 22 pages

Little Feet Going Nowhere: 11,419 words, 29 pages

I have chosen to write most of my novellas as serials, with Winter, Poet, Out of Time, The Spiral Case, and the Children of Yakub all still in the works. I find this length difficult to pull off with a single character perspective. To me a novella is more like a novel than a novelette as far as the nuance and energy of composition.

Comes the Six Winter Night: 34,852 words, 62 pages [anthologized in Pillagers of Time]

First Contact: 33,088 words, 77 pages

Serialized novels are open ended in that you have plenty of time to write toward your destination, using bookmarks within pivotal chapters to write yourself out of any holes you might have publicly dug for yourself. I begin a novel when I have three or four scenes solidly written in my head, with one being the opening chapter and the other being the closing. The next step is a table of contents and dramatis personae list. I use strict character viewpoints and do not take advantage of viewpoint shifts or plot twists. I leave it to the characters to warp and twist the plot, giving myself wide latitude to make adjustments within a given chapter by adding or dropping bookmarks [subchapters]. I have written only a couple of chapters from two perspectives.

Probably my trademark approach as a novelist is to approach each chapter as its own story. I never plot action scenes, but let them spring from my damaged brain. This comes from boxing and stick fighting. During the psychological preparation phase a fighter tries to visualize all possibilities, good and bad, and find answers in his mind. I use this process when being stalked or threatened in street situations also. After decades of this I essentially have a violence randomizer in my head. So, the action that people seem to think I spend so much time writing is not even considered. Once the scene is set I’ll say to myself, something like, “Okay a one on two spontaneous attack on a sidewalk—a mail box and parked car—write.” Depending on the viewpoint character I then go through and insert clarifications and thoughts or muddy things up. If this is a librarian being beaten by a gangster I’m just writing about pain from a confused overwhelmed perspective. If I’m writing from the gangster’s viewpoint he is already thinking about where to drag the body, looking around for witnesses, and debating whether to kill or bind with the demon within…

Beyond the Ember Star: 69,660 words, 121 pages [anthologized in Pillagers of Time]

Thunderboy: 93,289 words, 137 pages [anthologized in Pillagers of Time]

The World is Our Widow: 54,270 words, 98 pages

Behind the Sunset Veil: 101,712 words, 186 pages

Den of The Ender: 67,682 words, 123 pages

God’s Picture Maker: 66,858 words, 123 pages

For an example of my method for approaching such a daunting project see Tackling the Epic Novel on the fiction page. The thing to remember with this is to use a format that can be broken into a trilogy or tetralogy, in case you actually get a print publisher. I wrote Of The Sunset World as a three-book epic. My current project, Seven Moons Deep, is not structured in books but in story threads, one of which I have published as the novelette By This Axe!, which I expect to outsell the novel.

My best piece of advice for a story of this length is to dig really deep into your characters, all of them. To turn this many pages the reader has to care about the characters. The other key was to leave some possibilities undeveloped. Save it for a sequel.

I had a character that appeared in two chapters in Of The Sunset World, who really deserved his own story thread. He was the shaman of a band of Native Americans named the Big Waters, who had disappeared from the historic record before European contact—just before, perhaps from disease. This permitted my time-hunter character the latitude to commit a little genocide in the chapter Big Water Blood Song, without trashing the timeframe.

I really wanted to write from the perspective of that shaman who saw his people rubbed out by what he believed to be a demon. But, as in life, sometimes the most interesting and possibly important people we meet keep walking on by, never to be seen again. That character still tugs at my writer’s heart strings so he will get his due in Seven Moons Deep. Avoid the temptation to explore every interesting byway you create. This keeps you on track, under the target word count, and lays in a store of material for a sequel or stand alone.

Of The Sunset World: 272,000 words, 466 pages

I hope this has been some help.