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Story Length: Do NOT trust Wikipedia!

Addison

Auror
Today I'm close to finishing a short story first draft. But I was a little anxious about my word length. It's currently 7,700 words. I typed "Short story word length" in google search. Wikipedia says a short story is under 7500 words, and a NOVEL is as short as 40,000 words. Yeah I leaned closer and muttered some choice words.

Going on Writers Digest, written, read and respected by real writers, I was relieved to find the actual recognized length of a short story to be between 1,500 and 30,000 words. Novellas are 30K to 50K words, and Novel length starts at 55K.

I also read that a short story basically has seven scenes. Or seven core scenes. THAT info has been very helpful in the last ten minutes, I kid you not. Try it out. Happy Writing! :)
 
Today I'm close to finishing a short story first draft. But I was a little anxious about my word length. It's currently 7,700 words. I typed "Short story word length" in google search. Wikipedia says a short story is under 7500 words, and a NOVEL is as short as 40,000 words. Yeah I leaned closer and muttered some choice words.

Going on Writers Digest, written, read and respected by real writers, I was relieved to find the actual recognized length of a short story to be between 1,500 and 30,000 words. Novellas are 30K to 50K words, and Novel length starts at 55K.

I also read that a short story basically has seven scenes. Or seven core scenes. THAT info has been very helpful in the last ten minutes, I kid you not. Try it out. Happy Writing! :)

The seven scenes information is far more helpful than the length, I think.

Maybe I should try a short story of my own sometime...

Edit: On the Wikipedia vs. Writers Digest discrepancy, there are all sorts of differing and often contradicting opinions on these things that I've heard. It's complicated by the fact that standards are different depending on genre and audience--with novels, anyway.

YA novels are "supposed" to be shorter than adult novels, I think one site said 80k words...? But, when I looked at a list of word counts of popular young adult novels, almost all exceeded that. Confusing.
 
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Insolent Lad

Maester
Any rule on length is arbitrary. I like the 40,000 word cutoff myself — 'The Great Gatsby' is under 50,000 and I certainly consider it a novel. I might call it a 'short novel' but I don't see it as a novella. What is sometimes termed a 'novelette,' up to 15 or 20,000 words I would be inclined to call pretty much a longish short story.
 
A short story should have exactly 5023 words, no more and no less. If you can't hit 5023 (including "The End" if you use this closer), then you are doing something wrong.

I once saw a 5024-word....something, and I vomited a little in my mouth. That's a too-short novella; novellas should be exactly 30,345 words. I don't know what the author was thinking.
 

Mytherea

Minstrel
Super-fast breakdown of story word count lengths and labels. Different sources will sometimes give you different answers, but for the most part, most SF/F/H traditional markets follow these:

Less than 1,000 words = Flash. Usually. Sometimes, it wavers within the 500's (so, >500-1,500, depends on the market)

1,000-7,500 = Short story. 3,000-4,000 is generally considered the sweet spot for short fic, and some markets won't take anything longer than 4,000. Sometimes, anything under 10,000 words will be classified a short story. It depends on the market.

7,500-10,000/15,000/17,000/20,000 = Novelette. Novelettes are a little harder to define. Basically, they're anything that could be considered a long short story, but too short to be a novella. They're also a pain to try to sell to trad markets.

20,000-40,000 = Novella. Also a pain to try to sell, there aren't a lot of novella markets out there for untested writers (though this seems to be possibly changes with the advent of e-books, since then there isn't that whole printing cost thing with short books wasting standard sized covers, ect.). Established writers with a following, though, are a completely different issue. There's quite a few who are branching out into novellas more (there were two recent Publisher's Weekly issues where the SF/F reviews were just of novellas, though most were from established writers with a following or Tor.com).

40,000-59,000 = The word count abyss. Seriously, it's neigh impossible to sell a novel this short or a novella this long in adult markets, even as an established writer. But it's not impossible, just nearly.

Note: adult markets. YA and middle grade are completely different, and I don't know the word count breakdown for those that well.

60,000+ = Novel. 60,000-80,000 is a short novel (think, Harlequin romance length). 90,000-100,000 is usually considered the comfortable spot. 110,000-140,000 is high end average for SF/F. 140,000-220,000 is epic sized SF/F, and though perhaps challenging to sell as a first-timer, it isn't impossible. A guy I know just sold his 230,000 word SF novel to one of the bigger publishers (sans agent, btw), and it's his first (then again, there's extenuating circumstances there, so don't assume this the rule). However, longer than 230,000 and you start getting into special order cover sizes and issues with the binding breaking and the signatures falling out, so they usually don't go much larger than that without cutting the book into parts and selling them as separate books. Again, though, 'cause e-books can't really fall apart, there's flexibility with the higher word counts for digital-only releases.

This is, of course, going with traditional publishing labels, and most of those labels have to do with marketing and printing costs. If you're self-pubbing and want to call a 30,000 word novella a novel or a 11,000 word novelette a short story, you most certainly can. No word count police are going to tell you that you can't. Also, categories are fluid and unless a market says "anything over 6,000 words will be rejected automatically" (or whatever word count), anything goes. Sometimes, though, word count labels can be helpful guides if someone asks you, "What are you writing?"
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Short story length definitions ("it's more of a guideline") do not matter. What matters is the length requirements of the magazine to which you are submitting the story. That's it. Don't worry about any of the rest of it.

Same goes for novels, comes to that. Are you submitting to a publisher? Does the publisher have a minimum length for novels? A maximum? That's your target, for Publisher A. For Publisher B is may be a little different.

If you are self-publishing, you can call it whatever you please. I suggest Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel.
 

Aurora

Sage
My understanding has been as follows: (depending on genre)
-short stories up to 8k
-novelettes 8500-17500k words
-novellas 17500-49k
-novels 50k+
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Things like this are like the pirate code.

What ever works, but using the seven scene short story format is about the same as choosing an arbitrary word count. My scenes typically go between 1500-2500 words, so seven scenes could easily go beyond 10000 words under the right circumstance.

And I would bet there are plenty of short stories out there that are just one scene. For me, I try to map out a 7 point plot arc, and it's simple enough if you design your scene(s) well to move through them in an natural and efficient manner. It all depends on the needs of the story. Some times your story only needs 2000 words to make its point. Other times it takes 10000 or more.
 

Mythopoet

Auror
Three things...

1. You should never "trust" wikipedia for anything important. This shouldn't even be in question.

2. Word count is not standardized across the industry. Different organizations will have different standards for it. And it's not really that important. Write your story to the length that feels right. You can figure out what to call it later.

3. Did you actually read the wikipedia entry? (Not meaning to be rude, an honest question.) It says that the 40,000 mark is specifically used by the SFWA for the Nebula awards and cites the source. And if you go to the SFWA website this is indeed accurate. So wikipedia's information is actually trustworthy in this case. You don't have to agree with the SFWA of course.
 
Wikipedia's a great launching pad and, I think, works well when trying to understand the gist of whatever, or for general background information.

As for word count, I'd go with Skip's suggestion to worry more about length requirements set by magazines...or Writing Challenges!

My biggest pet peeve on this score is only tangentially related: Items on Amazon that don't clearly state that the "book" or "novel" is really novella length or even a long short story. Of course, I've always made a habit of scrolling down to look at Amazon's more detailed description, because it includes page count.
 
Of course, specific markets have their own requirements, and they can label the works they publish whatever they want, as has been said.

But like Mythopoet indicated, if you're looking for a standard in the SF/F realm, then the rules for the Nebula awards, sponsored by the professional organization Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), are as standard as you can get if you're writing science fiction or fantasy.

Nebula Rules - The Nebula Awards

Nebula Awards will be made in the following categories:

Short Story: less than 7,500 words;
Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words;
Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words;
Novel: 40,000 words or more.
At the author’s request, a novella-length work published individually, rather than as a part of a collection, anthology, or other collective work, shall appear in the novel category.

And if any work is submitted for the Nebula awards, then regardless of what market published it or what they labeled it, the SFWA will consider it in the category corresponding to the above rules.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Not to go too far OT, but here is the guideline I have given my students for the last decade: Wikipedia is a fine place to start your research, but a poor place to stop.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I hate going out on limbs, but I'm going to say with unusual confidence that this is no longer a short story, heh heh.

I think I added a novella to my novel since sending it off to the editor. Damned close, anyhow.

My WIP is 110,000 and I'm expecting it to grow by 10k-20k in the rewrite.

O_O
 

Addison

Auror
According to an acclaimed, best selling, professional author Deborah Chester, (who mentored the just as successful Jim Butcher) the general reference for literary forms and lengths is as follows (quoting from her book "The Fantasy Fiction Formula"):
"Novellas: Roughly 35 -50K words
Novelettes: 15 - 30K words
Short Stories: 2 - 10K Words.
The mathematically alert will notice the gaps between the categories. That's because these lengths aren't precise."

So a 12K word story would be a long Short Story or a short Novelette, either one would fit but I'd personally go with a long Short Story.
 
Just listened to the newest Writing Excuses podcast, and it covers this topic.

12.27: Choosing a Length | Writing Excuses

For the nerdy sort, there's even a formula for guessing about how long your story idea should be once it's written:

Ls=((C+L) *750)*1.5Mq

(In English: Add the number of characters and the number of locations. Multiply that sum by 750. Then multiply that number by 1.5 times the number of MICE elements the story incorporates.)​

So if you are on the line, are you writing a short story or novella or what, just plug in the data, heh, to find an approximate word count.

Mileage might vary.
 
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