I’m sitting here conducting an experiment that would probably warrant being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I’ve got a calculator in one hand and a couple of dozen novels open in front of me on the desk. For the last half-hour or so I’ve been counting up the number of words on a single solid page of text and multiplying by the number of pages to give me a very, very rough idea of how many words make up a decent sized novel.
There is a reason for this mad endeavour of course, but I’m not sure it’s really all that bright of an idea. You see I’ve been reading about some of the online reading competitions and challenges such as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo to its’ friends) where entrants have to produce a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. From reading some of the stories on the forums etc it seems fair to say that some people write to win, others to prove they can and some people just for the hell of it.
I know it’s not the number of words that’s important, but it does give me an idea of when a piece of prose stops being a short story and graduates to fully fledged noveldom.
Is there a point to all this I hear you ask. Well yes, yes there is. I’m thinking about giving it a go. I’m not sure when to start, or what manner to proceed in, but I’d like to try and set myself the goal of producing something approaching a novel in length and composition before the end of 2010. The best I can figure it from the novels I’ve looked at tonight an average length for a paperback novel appears to be between 75,000 and 100,000 words at about eleven words per line and very roughly thirty-two lines per page. These are rough estimates of course, but as I said I was only looking for a ballpark figure to give me an idea of what I’d be shooting for.
So here’s the rough plan. I’m going to try and come up with a story idea worth attempting to write a novel around, and then I’m going to try and sit down and at least write out a first draft. I’m going to set myself a target of maybe one or two thousand words a day, and try to stick to it. I’m going to hammer away without excessive revisiting, self-editing or messing about and I’m hopefully going to have something worth reading at the end of it.
All things being equal, it should take between two and three months of steady work to produce something worthwhile. I reckon if I can bring myself to stick to a decent writing schedule for that I can do it for anything.
I’ll probably post on my progress, or lack thereof in the near future.