Three Hundred Pages

     Over the past several months I've been working on my second novel, an action book. It has been an interesting process in several ways, one of which is that this has ended up being a longer project than I anticipated, and longer than my first novel.

     My first book was a shorter project, which I'm not surprised at, since I had not experience writing anything of that length. I was still exploring how to write a novel, so I was still trying to understand how it works in a very real way. One can read about it and watch Youtube videos, but doing it is a bit of a different experience. however, when it was all said and done, my first book ended up being about 260 pages, beginning to end. Now this isn't too long of a book, considering different genres and the lengths of books out there today. My first book will probably fall under General Fiction, so it could be relatively short and still be all right.

     I know it's early to talk about it, my second book, on the other hand, is in a different genre. Now a lot of writers will stay true to their type and only write in one genre. I think that, for myself, I discover ideas for stories, and then find the genre of the story after I begin to write it. Because my second story is an action book, there is a different style of writing throughout the novel than my first book. This means that, hopefully, the plot moves faster. Readers, then, will expect some longer novels in the Action genre than under the General Fiction genre.

     Now when the editors come into play they may ask the author to write more scenes, so my book may be longer. They may ask him to cut or edit scenes that slow down the plot and which don't move the story forward. (I can certainly think of a few of these in my own book.) The thing is, I'm still working on the first draft, so we may just have to see how the story works out, and how long the book turns out to be.

     For the last two weeks I've been keeping track of my daily word count just towards my novel, and I've been managing a steady 1,200 words or more, just about every day. A few bad days, some very good days with 1,300 or 1,600, but almost every day I get in more than 1,000 words each day.

     But different books have different word counts, even within the same genre. Depending on how complex the author decides to make the plot, the number of characters involved, the time-span, how far the characters may travel and how quickly, and how much detail the author goes into - all of these elements may add up for a novel of great length, or it may be something much smaller.
J.R.R. Tolkien considered his 'Lord of the Rings' to be one work. Those who worked with him saw that it wasn't publishable in the form of the tome that it was and broke it up into three volumes, a trilogy as we know it today.

     As I write and as I read I've found that I don't have a particular tie to any one genre. Some people, for instance, love science fiction books and would rather read and write those all day. For others it's romance or high fantasy. I've never made that distinction. I've read some sci-fi, some high fantasy, some action, a thriller or two, and some Christian fiction, so I've been all over the board for genres, I think. As I said before, my way of writing is to discover what the story is first, and then to label it for marketing.