I think my story is getting out of control

Laiceps:

I had much the same problem. I worked on my story for so many years and built up such an epic scope that I found telling it extremely frustrating and problematic.

Even worse, the characters I had created as a pre-teen and teen were ringing hollow decades later.

In the end, I kept all my lore and history and tossed my story and characters. I wrote something more intimate within the context of the bigger picture. I found it much easier to manage than telling stories of impossibly epic characters. My epic characters became the background mythology for the newer characters.

It helped me to contain the narrative. Of course that is only one approach. The chainsaw edit is rather effective as well as so many others have pointed out.

WillSauger said:

Writing one long book and breaking it up is not creating separate books, but volumes of a single one.
Only a very well experience and published writer can pull that off. (Looking at you, George R.R. Martin).

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Joe Abercrombie would be surprised to hear that, since his first published work was the first part of a trilogy which in no way stood alone (and was over 150,000 words besides).

L. Y. said:

The word count limit for first-time sci-fi/fantasy authors stands at 120,000.

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Guess the Word Count Police forgot to inform Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, and Scott Lynch (among others) of this. They seem to have forgotten to inform their publishers as well.

Chasing the Horizon said:

Joe Abercrombie would be surprised to hear that, since his first published work was the first part of a trilogy which in no way stood alone (and was over 150,000 words besides).


Guess the Word Count Police forgot to inform Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, and Scott Lynch (among others) of this. They seem to have forgotten to inform their publishers as well.

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As I was preparing my manuscript for submission to a big fantasy publisher, I read specifically. "We publish epic fantasy and expect high word counts."

I would expect your word count to be appropriate for the story above all. If your fantasy is about a badass fighter with the cliche jungle cat sidekick named spot, or wolf named fuzzy, then you will want to get that word count down under 100k

But if you are dealing with court intrigue, continent sweeping conflicts, and a struggle for world dominance.. ala GoT, LoTR, Wheel of Time, et. then you are are going to be in trouble if you aren't at least to 150k words. My book is 185k, chopped down from 240k and the chief criticisms aimed at it by readers are that it is too short and moves too quickly.

There is no exact science in any of this.

my 2 cents

I agree, just write it first! Simple as that

Your in the exact same boat as I was. I started dreaming/thinking of a story about 10 years ago, but never wrote it down. It grew so large in my head that I finally decided to make it a reality. Problem was, where do I began and where do I end?

I came to the conclusion that I'm just going to make it an ever-going series of books. Not plan out how many or anything like that. I thought of a good "cliffhanger" for the end of the first book and now I'm building around that. And in the next book, I'll do the same, and continue from there.

But I echo everyone's opinions though. The most important thing to do is to just start writing. There is no right or wrong to how to write. We all write different. Just pick a beginning, pick an end, and start writing. Remember, you can go back and change it as many times as you like, but you'll never get an outline done until you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard lol).