Ever tried to write a short story and ended up with a novel? Attempted a novella that blossomed into a series? Gotten hooked by flash fiction that snowballed into an entire extended universe? You’re not alone! This post came about through both experience and observation—namely, seeing just how common it is for authors to start a book and discover midway through that they are not, in fact, writing the length of story they anticipated.
After years of such observations (and experiences) I began to ask: Is it possible to avoid this problem from the outset? Can the length of a story be predicted early on? Maybe even at the idea stage?
Turns out it absolutely can.
This carries some necessary caveats. The theory I am about to share cannot cover every single idea, story execution, writing style, or fiction experiment authors out there might try. I’ve violated it once or twice myself. But as a rule of thumb, I have seen it field-tested and found that it holds.
How To Use This Theory
Got a book idea? Great! Read through this post to find which book-length category most closely aligns with it. You will (hopefully) find out how likely your story is to balloon on you.
Got a book size you’re aspiring to, and need an idea? Great! Read through this post to get a sense of the idea scope that might fit within your desired wordcount. You should (hopefully) be able to pick a right-sized idea upfront.
Without further ado, then, here are the different levels of idea size, as measured by the books they produce.
Level 1: Novellas
A novella is a story with a wordcount between about 20k and 40k words. The lower bound of that varies depending on where you look; some definitions set it at 17.5k, but for the purposes of this blog post, the two are close enough.
A novella-sized idea centers one character’s problem. One. Two if you’re pushing it, but that raises the bar of craft skill necessary to keep the book below 40k. This character problem is also typically inward-facing. This means it’s resolvable through a change in the character’s own beliefs or actions rather than a social shift around them. If there is a shift, it’s in their immediate environment or social circle.
For example:
- A girl who gets bullied at school learns to stand up to the perpetrators
- A haunted house tour guide has a harrowing face-off with an evil spirit that attacks their tour group
- Two childhood best friends discover their love for one another during a cozy cabin getaway
This means novellas tend to be quite individualistic by design. They also provide little to no room for padding: subplots, extra POVs, and hybrid genres (ex. Fantasy-Romance where you intend to develop both the Fantasy and the Romance) will almost certainly land you in novel territory, even with a novella-sized plot. You have been warned.
Level 2: Novels
A novel is generally defined as a story with 50k+ words. You may notice this leaves a gap between the definitions of novella and novel. It doesn’t really matter; realistically, very few books land between 40-60k words for what I suspect are structural reasons. But that’s a topic for another day.
A novel broadens the plot view afforded by a novella, and is able to explore a character’s problem in the context of a societal (or larger group) problem. You start to see the wider world around the character, and how it interplays with them as an individual.
For example:
- A closeted gay character falls in love and has to grapple with the challenge of self-discovery and coming out while courting his crush
- A group of friends discover their boarding school is run by a cult, which they race to expose before it brainwashes their classmates
- A character is accused of being a witch and cast out from her town, only to become a local hero by using her eccentric magic to save them from a pixie infestation
However, if the societal problem in your story is systemic, you cannot expect to fix it in the span of a standalone novel. The closeted gay character will not resolve his family’s internalized homophobia—or maybe even his own. The boarding-school cult might fall, but the parents who shipped their kids off there likely won’t answer for their sins on-page. The witch character’s town will not—and should not, for reasons I’ll discuss later—overhaul their views of witches overnight.
By the end of a standalone, you might get your characters and/or their society to a point where that work of unpacking social issues can begin in earnest. But if you wish to continue on and show the change on page, friend, welcome to the land of series.
Level 3: Series
A series is a consecutive collection of novels linked together by a overarching plot. For the purposes of this theory, I am excluding series of standalones, series of novellas, and other such deviations. Long-running serials may fall into this category, depending on how cumulative vs. episodic they are. The more cumulative the story, the bigger the idea required. Ex. A serial where a detective MC solves a new murder mystery every “book” or arc is very episodic. If those murders begin to link together into a whole crime ring, though, that’s cumulative.
Series range in wordcount, but feature predictably large idea sizes. With multiple books, you have room to tackle a societal-scale problem through the lens of individual character problems embedded in it. If your story idea requires action or decision-making at a social scale, you’re probably looking at this category. Deconstructing social systems of power? Series. Starting a revolution? Series. Geopolitics? You guessed it—series.
Specific examples might look like:
- A ragtag crew of planet raiders accidentally become figureheads of a movement to topple a galactic empire
- A devoted priestess discovers her sect has summoned a demon. She sets out to start a new religious order and raise a god to save her society from ruin
- An assassin gets hired by a corrupt king to silence that king’s own son. Upon learning this, the assassin helps the prince take the throne and stop a war instead
If something in your story world needs to change for your plot to resolve, good luck fitting it in a standalone. But where’s the fun in carving so much juicy detail out of a story to fit it in a single novel anyway?
Consequences of a Size Mismatch
It is theoretically possible to fit (almost) any story idea into (almost) any size of book. So if you want to come at me and describe how you crammed geopolitics into a short story, sure! Congrats. But I encourage you to sit down and think about what you lost along the way.
There are really only two ways you can go with a size mismatch: a story longer than its idea can support, and a story shorter than the breathing room its idea needs. I’ll address each of these in turn.
Small Ideas Stretched Out
Stories that take a small idea and spin it out into something bigger can happen for a number of reasons. You might be trying to “fluff up” a novella to enter it into a novel contest. You might have a novel that did really well, so you (or your publishers, or your readers) pressure you to write a sequel you hadn’t initially planned. Or you might just be an overwriter. You decide.
These stories feel, well, overwritten. They are bloated by design: extra words, extra scenes, extra subplots, extra points of view. They might have “filler” arcs, chapters, or side quests that accomplish nothing for the overall plot. They might have whole characters who get page time but could be cut with little to no consequence to the story. They will likely have pacing problems.
As a Writer
While writing, you may feel this. You may find yourself fishing for new things to write about, pulling on comparatively trivial threads, or inventing new conflicts when the ones you have lose steam. You may feel your story has gone on too long, or that you’ve lost sight of what you were originally writing. Or you may feel none of these things, but get feedback that readers or critics are bored. That is a hallmark sign of filler.
As a Reader
The consequences of this story overextension are exactly that: loss of reader investment. The book’s pacing drags. It gets harder to care about too many characters, or characters who don’t have roles in the plot. Readers lose track of important plot points over long periods of time, and important details drown under piles of other stuff.
Overstuffed plots also make it hard to determine what’s actually relevant to the story. In a best-case scenario, an invested reader has to wade through excess information to find the bits that matter. In worse cases, bloat can introduce details that never get resolved, and leave the story feeling messy, confused, and exhausting to slog through. Readers who aren’t already superfans may simply give up.
Big Ideas Compacted
On the other end of the spectrum are ideas that are suited to a longer story, but get compressed to fit a smaller form. This is particularly common among authors who get a grand idea and try to turn it into a queryable standalone. However, it can also occur in short-story or novella contests, anthologies, or cases where the author wants the feeling of a sweeping, complex world without committing to a series. Or they may simply be an underwriter. Most instances, though, tend to occur when an existing idea runs up against a wordcount cap, whether internally or externally imposed.
These stories feel underwritten. They have pacing problems in the opposite direction: scenes speed by, and some may be skipped entirely. Important transitions, elaborations, or moments of depth get missed in the rush to the end. Nuance is lost. Complex worldbuilding gets flattened. Characters turn out shallow or underdeveloped, and thorny problems are distilled into trite, neatly boxed solutions that likely don’t do justice to their subject matter. This becomes particularly noticeable when politics or social issues are involved.
As a Writer
If you’re not already used to writing long stories, you may not even notice this kind of compaction when it occurs. However, if you do, you may find yourself wishing for more space to explore interesting details. Tradeoffs become a routine part of your writing process: a soft romantic moment here, bit of worldbuilding there, an extra POV or subplot cut out to save time. These may feel like necessary sacrifices, but a look at the bigger picture will tell a different story. If you get reader feedback, critics may call the story rushed, or call out shallow worldbuilding, plot, or characters.
As a Reader
Readers may be hooked by a book that moves this fast, but they’re left feeling unsatisfied. To them, the story fell short of its full potential. Plot threads went unresolved. Relationships and characters remained surface-level. Solutions felt too easy. In the case of sociopolitics, this ease may veer into insult: wrap up an analogue to real-world oppression or corruption too neatly, and people who fight against those things in real life will find their experiences trivialized.
Cramped stories can give confusing signals of being well-received. Readers may whip through them in an evening, then resort to fanfiction to build out the thin bits where they felt pieces were missing. More privileged reviewers may praise the tidy wrap-up of sociopolitical issues. Pay attention to who those praise-singers are… and whose voices might be missing.
Can It Be Done?
At any point in your writing career, you may find yourself in a situation where the story idea you’re committed to doesn’t match the book length you want to write. There are reasons you might decide to write the story anyway. Maybe you’re trying to query, and this is the only work-in-progress you have. Maybe you’re just entering a contest, and plan to expand or shorten the book once the final round is done. Maybe you don’t care all that much about the story, and just want another book under your belt.
These are fair reasons! Just be aware of what you’re risking. Ask yourself what’s worth more to you: the specific book shape and length you’ve committed to, or telling the story the way it wants to be told.
You may also be reading this thinking YOU are the exception, and YOU can pull off an idea in a story length that doesn’t match it. If you’re highly experienced, have written many different book lengths with right-sized ideas, know how to scale the same idea up or down, and know exactly what you’re giving up by doing so, you may be right. But if you’re newer to the craft, that belief is probably a fallacy.
Ideas Can Scale
The good news is that experienced authors who attempt this are usually doing something else: they’re actually changing the size of the idea. This is entirely doable! And it can lift you clear of all the issues I’ve listed by re-matching your plot and book sizes.
Say you want to write an underdog overthrowing a political power (think The Hunger Games), but you want to do it in a standalone. Try one of the following:
- Shrink the villain. Instead of making your antagonistic power an entire national government, make them the corrupt council of a single city
- Shrink the goal. Instead of trying to topple a government, send your characters on a quest to document their corruption and expose them to their allies or the media instead
- Shrink the impact. Instead of making your character the revolutionary leader, have them organize their neighborhood and take down one corrupt official while others deal with the rest off-screen
Any one of these should land you closer to a novel-sized idea. It’s not a guarantee (you still have to resist the temptation to let the story run away on you) but it raises the chances. On the flipside, if you’re trying to write something bigger than the idea you have, you can reverse any of the above. Adding context, complexity, and larger scales of social impact should help your story sprout as you desire.
Final Thoughts
This theory, while field-tested and peer-reviewed, is not infallible. It is also not a rulebook. It’s a guideline and predictive tool to help you size your stories well at the idea stage, hopefully spare you the grief of rewriting, and empower you to write the story you’re trying to tell. If this post has derailed your plans for a current or upcoming book, I apologize. I hope you enjoy the reconstruction! And I encourage you to share this post with all your writer friends so they can suffer with you 😉
About the Author
A.B. Channing is a queer speculative fiction writer and blogger who loves analyzing the writing industry and dislikes speaking about himself in third person. Most of his work is Dark Fantasy or Horror, but he frequently dabbles in Sci-Fi, Paranormal, and Romance. When not at his keyboard, he can most often be found up to his elbows in a pond.
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