Words: 7226 – Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher They are all over 7,000 words long, and no one would call them a Novella. Some try to say that the cut off here for a short story is 7,500 words. It’s not really that simple, the lines are a little more blurred, but as a general rule of thumb this is an acceptable answer. If you are asking for lengths of works that are best-selling (at least over the last 10 years), 94-190 thousand words seems to be acceptable as an answer range.Īnswer: A novella is generally 15,000-50,000 words. So if you are asking how long should a novel be? The answer is at least 50,000 words. I always feel like looking at other writer’s works help me feel better about my own, when I find commonality. It’s not a number you would expect to get from the snapchat generation. Six of the 10 are over 150,000 words, but they do manage to stay under 200,000 words. You can’t say these novels are particularly short by any means. None of the books reach Long Novel status.
The majority of these books are between 130-150 thousand words. It’s hard to say there is much of a trend here. In the table below you can see the best NY Times sellers for the last 10 years. These 3 novels are very good examples of “famous” works of literature (in my opinion), and you can see that there is no set length. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye comes in at 73,404, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee sits right at 99,121. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 comes in at 49,500 words. When we look at lengths of famous and enduring novels we see that length varies greatly. At about 50,000 words a Novella becomes a novel, and at about 200,000 words a novel becomes a long novel, so between 50,000 and 200,000 words is what is generally considered a traditional novel. We do live in the soundbite, quick bite, internet condensed world.Īnswer: Novel length can vary greatly. It should be noted too, that many long novels have trouble gaining popularity among readers due to the dedication and time it takes to read them. It is recommend to avoid the long novel when writing, at least until you’ve built a name for yourself. Long novels, especially as a first novel, can be extremely hard to publish. It is true that many famous authors have written long novels? It is not really advisable to take up this practice. Ron Hubbard, David Foster Wallace and many others have written excessively long novels. What is a long novel? Or how long is too long for a novel?Īnswer: A novel can never be too long, but once you go over about 200,000 words you are writing a Long Novel (some say Russian Novel). Even though stories have been told by word of month since the beginning of time, the conventions, etiquette, and restrictions put on the modern short story did not exist until about 150 years ago.įrom short fables to lengthy narratives that just fall short of the next category, it may be easier to understand the nuances of short story, if we look at other forms that play a role in our everyday writing. This has been disputed by the 1700s publications of works by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, but these examples could still be considered gothic tales.Įither way, the short story in its current state is a very youthful literary form. Some consider the modern short story, in its current form, as the only American literary form.
It was proliferated by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Nikolay Gogola. The modern short story did not originate and take its current literary form until the 19th century. There is no exact word length, and to understand word count for different prose, it maybe be best to look closer at a variety of literary forms. We are addressing the modern short story and not the ancient tale, fable, or sketch. At around 15,000 words the novella is born. Answer: The short story usually falls between 1,000 and 15,000 words.