Five Reasons Your Novel’s Word Count is So Low
Why you might be finishing short
You’ve written most of your novel. You finally finished the ending, untangled those plot threads, and paved over your plot holes. You decide you’re finished, and you’re ready to declare your project finally complete, and ready for submission!
Except when you check the word count, you’re met with about half the words you intended. Whoops. Can’t submit half a manuscript. You’ll be getting more rejection letters than you know what to do with. So, what do you do about that?
The first step to figuring out how to beef up your novel is figuring out what it is that’s preventing it from full-length in the short place.
Problem 1: Your Manuscript isn’t Actually Finished
You’ve drawn your idea to a close, and it’s come up a bit shorter than you would have liked. Assuming you don’t have a heavy-handed structural editor to make these decisions for you, you’re likely now stuck with the issue of “Well, what now?”
Go back, and read your entire manuscript again. Did you tie up all your loose plot threads? If your protagonist solves the problem effortlessly, did they really learn anything? Did anyone grow? Would the reader feel satisfied with the journey?
It’s time to take a step back, and take a look at the larger structure of your story as a whole. Potentially consider using some of those plotting diagrams, and make sure that you’ve actually created a complete character arc. Maybe list out the events of your novel, and see if there’s anything you’re missing to tell your complete story.
Problem 2: Your Characters are Railroading
For someone who typically writes nonfiction(like me), or doesn’t write much fiction at all, telling a story can be daunting. There’s a tendency to try to get the plot to happen as quickly as possible, to try to get your plot to simply happen, without any stops along the way.
It’s possible that your characters are simply going from point A, to point B, to point C, ticking off plot points as they go, and not ever really stopping to smell the subplot. Like a train, they simply follow the railroad tracks and never go anywhere else.
The solution to this problem can take many forms. Perhaps your heroes go on an unrelated quest along the way that ultimately leads to a secondary character’s growth. Maybe a minor character becomes unexpectedly important again. Truly, the possibilities are endless.
Now, while it is by far the most common way to expand the tension in your novel without actually changing the structure, or introducing much in the way of new plot elements, I implore you: do not try to shoehorn in a romantic subplot. If you already had a romantic subplot that was well-thought out, and planned, excellent. Carry on with your subtextual flirting. Forcing one just for the sake of word count is original sin.
Problem 3: Your Prose is Too Efficient
Building on the above idea, if you’re not used to writing fiction, but you still are pretty comfortable just simply writing, you might run into trouble writing far too little. You might just simply ignore things that you’ve developed, because you’ve dismissed it as unimportant.
Consider using some less-succinct language. This falls under the incredibly-common writing advice of “Show, don’t tell.” Don’t tell us that the Susan has always been determined to reach her goals — that’s a little less than a line or so. Instead, show us Susan’s training montage, her commitment to studying, and her coping with stress. We’re a lot more likely to resonate with her when she actually does succeed than if we were just simply told that “she’s determined.”
Similarly, chew the scenery in places. This ties to problem 5, but if you’re in a new and enchanted land in a portal fantasy, or your American protagonist just moved to Europe for the first time, the reader is starving for a vivid description of this new, fantastical land. You can afford to be a little overzealous with it, even; build a world that your readers feel that could be real.
Problem 4: There Aren’t Enough Characters
Even if your main character is a shut-in that tries to avoid people, or a wandering swordsman that has sworn himself to a lifetime of isolation, you’re going to have at least a few minor characters, and your story is going to have to have dialogue or interaction at some point. A few stories don’t, but they’re virtually unheard of in the modern writing.
Perhaps there’s no dialogue in your novel at all. Perhaps it’s all internal dialogue, and you’ve just simply haven’t yet decided to have your isolated main character interact with another sentient being.
More likely, if this is your issue, you’ve got some nonessential, one-dimensional non-characters running around for the main character to interact with, but nobody that plays a significant role. Stories like this can definitely work; The Old Man and The Sea is probably the most famous example of very little character interaction resulting in a still-compelling narrative.
However, if you’re struggling to meet your word count, and you don’t have any other characters, chances are that your protagonist is lonely. Give them a friend (or enemy) to play off of. You’ll probably even learn something new about them!
Problem 5: The World is Flat and Gray, and All The Characters are Featureless
If your novel is too short, but the plot is fine, you might just simply not be painting the scenery enough. If your characters could just as easily be faceless screens relaying dialogue to one another in a featureless grey padded room, and nothing significant changes about your story, it might be time to take a step back and build your world a little bit.
If you’re writing realistic fiction, historical fiction, or contemporary, this is where your research comes in. Find some pieces of trivia about your setting that are either incredibly interesting, or add color to the overall story.
Don’t be afraid to add something pointless, at first! As you continue to explore, and write what you initially thought might be a pointless scene might end up being important later, and add an enormous amount of flavor to your world.
Not a Problem: Maybe your novel isn’t too short; maybe it’s just the right length.
I’m definitely in the minority here, but I personally believe the novella is just as good of a storytelling medium as the novel, and shorter fiction allows for a greater succinctness and focus of ideas.
It’s possible that your idea is fantastic, that you’ve told your story in as succinct a manner as possible, that your story is complete, and well-developed, it just isn’t…long.
For something like science fiction or fantasy, I definitely would prefer some longer-form fiction for world-building — a bit more meat of the world to sink my teeth into. However, for a contemporary novel, or some sort of analysis on the human condition that isn’t told through the medium of allegory, more than 50K words makes it start to feel like I’m being subjected to rant that has no foreseeable end. Padding a story like that with unnecessary details only lessens its quality.
While traditional publishing may abhor short-form work,(largely due to the minuscule amount of real estate they take up on the shelf) short work has a phenomenal place in self-publishing, where most readers are looking for a high-volume of short reads, rather than a large book to sit on the shelf.
