How Long Can You Go? Word Count Limit for First Books

First-time authors who love epics, such as Tolkien or the Outlander or Game of Thrones series, often ask me about word count for their manuscripts. "I'm at 150,000 words," one writer told me recently, and "I just can't seem to cut anything." Another wrote me this week about her ending--not sure where to stop, she keeps writing. Such dilemmas are common in the drafting stages, and I've encountered them too. Writing can be so satisfying, and trimming not so much.

If you're planning to self-publish, this is not an issue. You don't have to follow any rules but your own and your story can be as long as you want it to be, if you can afford the cost. But if you're hoping to find an agent and publisher, it's good to know the ballpark numbers--what's acceptable in the industry today.

Agents are particularly straightforward about their ability to sell first-time manuscripts that are less than 60,000 or that exceed 90,000 words. One of my early novels was around 45,000 words; an agent I approached loved the story but declined to represent me. "It's just too hard to sell that size book," she told me.

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Using the Storyboard for Short Pieces as Well as Long

Lila came to my remote "learn to storyboard your book" class to work on her novel. Recently, she emailed me, wondering if storyboards also were useful when planning shorter pieces, such as short stories or essays. "I often know how I want to start and end a short story," she wrote me, "but the part in the middle gets a little foggy. I like the idea of using a W structure but I also don't have much time to have 3 turning points. So maybe it's just a V?"
In my short stories, I also (usually) know where I want to begin and end. And Lila's right, that there's a lot less time to develop a full storyboard. But if I look carefully at my most successful short stories and essays, I can see at least the five main points of the storyboard in action.

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Dealing with the Emotions of Writing Tough Memories

Several clients have emailed me lately, asking how to deal with the flood of emotions that comes with writing memoir.
"Memories bring back the feelings, especially traumatic ones, and I get stalled out with my writing," said one client recently. "Do you have any tips for handling these overwhelming emotions so I can keep writing?"

I'm very familiar with that internal flood. When I was writing How to Master Change in Your Life, a spirituality/self-help hybrid, I remember working on a chapter about business failure and bankruptcy. Reliving that terrible time was so difficult, I actually had to run to the bathroom and throw up. Other times I'd get so stuck, I couldn't write one word.

Two things were happening: I was processing what I hadn't finished. And, at the same time, I was trying to get enough of a perspective to tell the story for others.

This double duty affected me on so many levels, I sought help. Talking about the events with others, especially a therapist, helped the processing part. I moved through shame and sadness, anger and fear, to gradual acceptance.

I also got great help from resources like The Tapping Solution, my daily spiritual practice, and chanting. These helped dispel some of the intensity and lift me above the constant mental chewing over what had happened (here's a short video on a chant that helped me the most--and I still use every day, especially now).

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Distant Dialogue: Pros and Cons of Including Emails, Letters, Social Media Posts, Texts, Phone Calls, and Journal Excerpts in a Book

Voices are only a small part of human communication. We read emotions via gestures, eye movement, and facial expressions, as well. In books, you can add setting to the mix--whatever the character notices in her environment emphasizes the emotion she's feeling. It's a rich mix.

I often hear from students who want to include letters, diary entries, texts, or social media posts in their stories. Can you do this, they ask, without losing the reader? And how much is too much?

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Honing Your Dialogue-Writing Skills--And Learning When Not to Use It

I love writing dialogue. I've taken classes on how to craft it, where to put it to break up and add rhythm to a scene. I see dialogue-writing skills needed across the board now, not just in fiction but also memoir and nonfiction.

Dialogue isn't easy to write well. Last week I talked about it being one of the red flags that editors use to spot an amateur writer. Maybe it's because beginning writers use dialogue more as a vehicle to deliver information. They don't understand its primary purpose: to increase tension and emotion in a scene.

I learned dialogue-writing many years ago, via a two-step method that serves me well today.

Step 1: Learn to listen to how human beings talk--and how they don't listen to each other.

Step 2: Learn to pare down the real-life dialogue into dialogue that works on the page.

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What Dialogue Can Do for Your Book--And What It Should Never Try to Do

In their book, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and Dave King tell the story of interviewing different editors in the publishing industry. They mostly wanted to know what editors looked at first, when reviewing a manuscript?

Answer: Editors scan the pages for a section of dialogue. They read it. If it's good, they read more.

If it's not good, the manuscript is rejected.

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Emotions: Bringing Them to the Page through Gestures, Movement, Facial Expressions, and More

A client in California emailed me a few weeks ago about film she watched that helped her write emotions more vividly into her memoir.

"As you know all too well," she said, "I don't write emotion--I just can't get the hang of it. Yesterday I had the best lesson I could imagine when I watched the 2008 animated movie Wall-E. In the first half of the movie only two words are spoken--the names of the two little robots who fall in love and have adventures. Yet the story is highly emotional.

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What's the Primary Environment of Your Book--Physically, Emotionally, Intellectually, Spiritually? And Why Does It Matter?

A new author wrote me this week. She'd read my writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, and it helped her realize which book project she needed to focus on first: a self-help/memoir hybrid. But she was confused by my chapter on finding the primary environment of your story. How did this apply to her book?

Every book has an environment that it lives in. I think of it like a lab where the experiment lives in a beaker or container.

Everything happens within that container.

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Strictly Accurate Memoir? True-Life Novel? How Close to the Line Do You Ride?

Camilla was a writer in my New York classes many years ago. She completed a memoir about her family in Italy during World War II. I remember it as a rich and interesting tale, full of great descriptions and intriguing characters. I also remember the dilemma she faced when she began sending it out into the world.

She wrote me, "I have been struggling with pinning down the genre, as memoirs are rarely taken if the person isn't famous. Although calling it a novel seems untruthful. In truth it is a bit of a hybrid, with scenes and dialogue created around facts, and my part of the story is 99 percent factual. I spoke with a published author who was very lovely and suggested I call it historical fiction. Yet is it remote enough in time, being about World War II? 

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Memoir's Primary Argument--How to Make Sure Your Memoir Has Universal Meaning

Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, once said, "The most powerful strand in memoir is not expressing your originality.  It's tapping in to your universality."  

A.M. Homes said, "Memoir is about more than you."

My aunt, who is in her 100th year, wrote her memoires.  It was fun to read them, and I learned things about my father's family that I never knew.   This style of memoir follows the Anglo-French definition:  an "account of someone's life." A wonderful gift to pass on to those who know you and who want to hear your past.

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