“I hate writing. I love having written.”
Dorothy Parker
At some point, every “aspiring” novelist – i.e. the type of person who thinks it’s easy to write their own book – types into Google some variation of What is the average length of a novel?
They (we) ask that question because a wordcount feels much clearer than an arbitrary page count. After all, we write in words. And on even the most productive days, we’re left with word tallies, as opposed to page tallies.
According to Google’s top result, the average length of a novel is 60,000 to 100,000 words long. That seems to be somewhere between 200 and 350 pages, depending on whether you’ve got one of those compact airport copies or the frivolous, flimsy independent bookstore variety. Hint: if the ink smudges like a newspaper, you’re holding the former.
Anyway, a word count like that doesn’t seem too daunting when you’ve done absolutely no actual writing. “That’s only 250 words per day for a year!” An achievable goalpost, right? But then you put pen to paper, you lose interest in your ideas, and you realize that 90,000 words is actually a tough hill to climb.
Well, it’s not a novel but… I’ve crossed the 150,000 word mark on this site. That’s about 10 hours of reading time, and an average of around 15,000 words per month since March 2020.
Goes to show that when you’re having fun – and writing on here is very fun – the task becomes a lot easier. Also a good example of what’s possible with a little bit more dedication and discipline, seeing as I’ve been writing far less than every day for the past couple of months and could be more consistent about it.
We’re coming up on the end of the year, and I have a few reflection-esque posts planned for December, but for now I’ll say this: If you’d told me I’d be sitting here, after Thanksgiving, with 147 published posts and 150,000 published words on my website, I would have said you were crazy. My goal for this year was to post just twelve pieces of writing. Twelve.
The website has helped motivate me, my friends and family who read it all have helped motivate me… even COVID’s bizarre impact on work/life balance has helped motivate me.
Looking forward to adding to my wordcount in 2021.