Is there a method to estimating the length of a work before writing it?
I am writing my first novel, which I think likely will end up being several volumes. Although I have a lot of experience in poetry and short stories, this is a very different challenge!
My question is about estimating the length of a work prior to writing.
It is an epic scale story that I have planned out in great detail (while of course remaining flexible). I have outlined it and started to write pieces of it, but still am easily less than 1% into actual writing. In this process I realized that I need to decide if I am going to try to do this in one volume or multiple.
This will help me decide how to structure the overarching storyline, as well as:
- When to bring the story arcs together
- Whether I need to shape a wrap-up/cliffhanger for each volume
- What level of detail to give to elements of the story. If I were to keep it to a single volume, I feel I would have to condense things and be too superficial. On the other hand, if I go into the level of detail that I enjoy (and have used in short stories), it could easily spread into a series of several books.
I attempted comparing it to other works such as LOTR, which I think is only slightly larger in scale, but my limited experience writing long pieces makes it difficult to conceptualize the relative weight of different events in my story.
I looked for advice on this, and I found reading this thread helpful. However, estimating length isn't much addressed. Is there a method for this?
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The main problem with trying to estimate something like this is that, even if two writers used the same very detailed plot summary to write a novel, they might produce works that aren't close to being the same length, because of the way they write.
Some authors are much more "concise" than others; for example, Voltaire's Candide has been described as a 1,000-page epic condensed into 75 pages, while Tolkien's work often rambled with details that weren't even relevant to the full plot (e.g. Bombadil). Admittedly that last example may not sound like it makes much difference, but there's a more relevant observation re: LOTR. If you work out how many words motivated each hour of film adaptation, they were condensed even more than most novels. (Much could be cut, e.g. in the first film characters step into a tunnel and are seen emerging from it a few seconds later, and quite a bit happens therein in the novel!)
Even the structure of a novel can influence how concise it is; for example, if the same events are told from multiple perspectives the word count will probably climb (see e.g. George R R Martin), whereas if characters are writing to each other with descriptions of what happened to them (see e.g. The Color Purple) the word count can fall.
The only thing I can recommend is bullet-pointing the plot in detail, with nested bullets so you can be confident of the relative weight of different chapters. If you then write one of them, you'll have a rough basis for extrapolation. But even chapter by chapter a novel can vary in how quickly it tells its story, so this will only be a rough estimate.
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I am not a writer, but I do have some experience with tackling significantly larger projects than ever done before. In my experience, when I've tackled a huge project without intermediate measurable and rewardable goals I get disillusioned quickly.
If you think it's going to likely be several volumes, then break it up now, in detail, how you want each volume to progress, resolve, and cliffhang. If you don't plan on cliffhangers now, it will be significantly harder to write them in later if you decide on the fly where the cliffhangers and volume separations need to be.
Then start writing one of the volumes and get that done and polished so you have a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction of a job-well-done. It may be the first volume, or it may be the last, depending on your specific novel outline and how you want it to end up. Many start writing at the beginning, but consider starting at the end so you can work in background details and foreshadowing as needed as you build up to the climax of your story without needing to do a bunch of rework later if you decide that you really did want to provide more foreshadowing or changed earlier storyline as you go along.
Besides, as other responses have indicated, there is no set length needed for a novel (unless you're working with a publisher with details specified in your contract with them, but I doubt that's in play here) so you can have volumes of 100 pages, 1000 pages, or somewhat varied between volumes. It's your writing so that's up to you. Just make sure that your writing is rewarding to you so you continue to look forward to it and not just get into it after a week or two and only see the huge outline ahead that seems insurmountable.
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I suspect not. Certainly I have never found any proportionality between a line of an outline and so many lines of finished text. A concept or event that you sum up in one line could take ten lines or a thousand lines to fully describe in exposition. Sometimes what seems like one chapter in an outline becomes three in the book, and sometimes what seems like three chapters becomes one.
I'm sure that there are some writers who have a pretty good intuitive sense of how long a work is going to be before they begin, at least for certain kinds of work. But I am pretty sure this come from an intuition based on long experience, rather than a transferable method that they could teach to someone else. And it may be that the real skill of such writers is not to estimate well, but to do a good job of hitting their estimates.
Writing is a craft, and part of that craft lies in producing work of salable length. Salable length is different for different markets, different subject, and writers of different reputations, but it is a key factor in the salability and the readability of most written work.
Rather than trying to estimate how long a work is likely to be if you write it down without any attempt to regulate its length, therefore, it may be more appropriate and more fruitful to focus on deciding what length is salable for a first novel in your chosen genre and working out how to bring the project in around that length. Of course, in your first novel you don't have much experience or intuition to draw on to hit those targets, so you are probably going to miss and you are probably going to have to revise to meet them. But then you are likely going to have to revise a lot anyway.
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