Sunday 5 December 2010

147,000... what, too much?

I am working currently on editing the first novel from the series that was born last year during NaNoWriMo, and when I had my final "polished" second-ish draft ready to start working on, these were the statistics:

Word count: 147,000
Page count: 243
Chapter count: 59

For a romance novel I got the impression that the word count (not to mention chapter count) needed to be slashed to smaller figures, so my main focus upon re-reading and editing was to cull as much superfluity as I could. It's been surprisingly easy so far to cull 17,000 words, and I am only up to chapter 29. So, as of today, current stats are:

Word count: 131,743
Page count: 228
Chapter count: 53

And just for fun, the original rough draft was 116,348 words, and had only twenty chapters!! And it was 174 pages long.
Posted by at 14:22
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2 comments:

  1. Anna Fierce9 December 2010 at 02:33

    I have the opposite problem...my novels aren't particularly long when I finish them in the first place, and then while editing, I find way more stuff to cut out than add in so I end up with a too low word count and I HATE padding stories with stuff it doesn't need just to boost the word count but I have trouble finding stuff that is necessary to the plot or the characters to add in. LOL

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  2. Trisha11 December 2010 at 20:58

    Like I said on your blog, it's surely better to trim away all the unnecessary fluff and have a nicely polished work at the end :)

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