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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29201
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29201
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 9