How long is a novel? Bloody long.

So the 45,000 word saga is behind me. Long behind. Although it was swiftly followed by the 50,000 word saga, 55,000 word saga, 60,000 word….you get the idea.

I have finally come to the realisation that as a writer you think your writing is crap most of the time. You just need to keep on writing. So I have.

And today……I hit 70,000 words. Hurrah!

I don’t know why that feels like a milestone but it does. Maybe because I feel like I’m now in the last third of the book (or my Practice Novel as I have now started calling it), on the home stretch. Based on my loose (and I mean loose baby loose) chapter plan, I figure I’m going to finish up somewhere around the 100,000 word mark.

So only 30,000 to go (*sighs and says strewth*).

There are no rules when it comes to what the word count should be for a book (trust me, I have Googled it. Several times). This is no better evidenced than by the fact that there is a bestseller on the market at the moment with a zero word count. It’s titled ‘What every man thinks about apart from Sex’. Honest to God.

Wish I had thought of that. Would have been a lot easier.

But that one seems to be a bit of a one off.  From my extensive Google searching (totally justified as a procrastination activity as the topic is writing related) it seems that most novels fall into the 80,000-120,000 word range. Unless you’re Vikram Seth writing An Equal Music of course. Although even he was outdone by L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote a 1.2 million word epic called Mission Earth, a fictional account of aliens, which is clearly in no way related to Scientology.

God, it makes me want to fall asleep just thinking about it.

So, 30,000 words to go. One month until I am back in Australia. Am I going to get it finished by then?

No.

But I do hope to have it finished by the time I go back to work on 4 July. Well, have the first draft finished. After that, I plan to put it in my bottom drawer for a couple of months and get started on the next novel. This is a tip I took from a seminar I went to with Pippa Masson, a Literary Agent at Curtis Brown, who said that all first novels should be locked in the bottom drawer or used as bonfire fuel (she didn’t actually say this, but that is the clear message I took away). Under no circumstances should 99% of them ever be sent to publishers or agents.

I won’t burn my practice novel. But I will lock it up. And then after a couple of months I’ll look at it again with fresh eyes to decide if it’s worth trying to salvage a second, third and perhaps fourth draft from. And this isn’t just me being a crazy perfectionist. When Mike Gayle wrote My Legendary Girlfriend, he says his first draft was ‘ten million different kinds of terrible’ and then proceeded to rewrite it 11 times. Yes, 11 times (*sighs and says strewth* again).

Writing is rewriting, apparently. Unless you are smart enough to write a book without any words, in which case I suspect you’re probably done after the first draft.