Word Counting - Defining the Length of What You Are Writing?

[Perpetual Man]

Right (or should that be write), hopefully nothing too serious just something that has been buzzing around my mind for a few days.

Putting aside different genres and fact and fiction, there are different lengths of the pieces we write:

Ranging from Flash Fiction through to a fully fledged novel.

Mostly I guess that what they are is defined by word count, but where does that definition settle?

When does Flash Fiction become a short story? When does a Short Story become a novella? When does this become a novel?

Are there any other definitions I missed.

Hope all that makes sense!

 

[D_Davis]

I think this is probably the standard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count

Novel over 40,000 words
Novella 17,500 to 40,000 words
Novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words
Short story under 7,500 words


Flash-fiction is usually about 500-1000 words.

 

[Nik]

With apologies to Wiki, I'd expect a novel to be 70,000+, generally 100k upwards...

( I'm about 120k in with a good dozen short chapters to go. ;-)

 

[Ursa major]

I think the definition that states that a novel is fiction of longer than 40K words is still true; it's just that the market seems to require them to be longer than that at the moment.

 

[Mouse]

That novel length though depends on the age range you're writing for. I know that's obvious, but there you go.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The book length depends on what age you are going for. Whether or not the book is a novel or not depends on word count.

The ranges that D_Davis gives are the ones set forth by SFWA (I don't know if they invented them, or simply adopted them). I do know that there are some small "literary" publishers who stretch novella length upward, but the SFWA definitions are pretty much standard for publishers who are looking for stories in our genre, so I always go with those.

 

[alchemist]

That novel length though depends on the age range you're writing for. I know that's obvious, but there you go.

Indeed. My WIP currently has 86K words, will probably end up about 120K, and is ostensibly for a YA audience. I'm going to have to seriously trim, maybe even delete a whole POV or character, or make it more adult.

 

[Perpetual Man]

Hmmm, so that means the short story I am working on is no longer a short story, it's now a novelette!

And if Flash Fiction is defined at something between 500-1000 words, what does it make material under that count (Like our 75 word stories)?

Personally I would have thought that Flash Fiction and anything closer to 1000 to long, but that's just me

 

[Colbey Frost]

I had a word count goal when I started writing my book. It drove me to keep going, and I would think its at the back of everyone's mind.

 

[william b]

For National Novel Writing month, the requirement is to write 50,000 words. But that is a short novel of about 175 pages. Some classic novels are that short. Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, to name just a few. Many publishers require novel manuscripts to be at least 80,000 words long.
I find it useful to look at word count to motivate me. I think writers who work with deadlines understand that it's important to have at least something to hand over when the time is up.
(I am 1,600 words into a story I want to be 7,500 words long).