Novel first draft becomes a novella instead

Me, every time. Trust the process- it sorts itself out

I bet there's a few folk whose novel ended up as a novella, too.

Mine's not too far off that happening. I'm currently at 50,000 but.... The more I tighten it the more I wonder if that one (or is it two/three) extra cut(s) might be needed to streamline the action.

Well, I set out to write a novella once and ended up with a novel...

[So, I had just finished a lengthy ms and wanted to do something shorter and fun, so I wrote a long novella of about 50k words, and my intention was to write another, companion novella with a sort of mirror-version of the first novella's plot. But that companion novella got more and more involved until it was over 90k words.]

The first draft of my WIP was 50K, and the third (and latest) draft was 100K. Not unusual for me to write a skeletal first draft and flesh it out in the rewrites.

My first draft was 49k and now it's at 67k. (it's YA) Don't worry. It's more common than you think. By the time I'm done with this edit I'm hoping for 70k.

Most of the bulk can come from adding immersive shows which are longer than tells, or possibly adding subplots to make the story more complex.

Reading Mistborn again, and really appreciating how we get three interwoven storylines for Kelsier: His effort to overthrow the Lord Ruler, his relational mentoring of Vin, and his angst and backstory over his dead wife, Mare. He has these different sort of narrative states he exists within. He feels real, as a result, and that's just one character. Vin is the other viewpoint and she's got multiple things going on as well. Sazed is not a viewpoint character at all but is fully fleshed out. The named cast is probably close to thirty at least, when all is said and done.

I can easily imagine the first draft of a fat novel like this being a third the length.

My last work was supposed to be a novella, but it turned into a 120k word novel instead.

HD Simplicityy said:

Im working on a futurism concept aiming to be 270 pages. Not heavy futurism.
The more I write the first draft the more it looks like a novella will take shape first. Who has written that way but ended up with their novel?

Click to expand...

I started with my story as 30 pages. Didn't know what i was dealing with.

Then I started "showing" instead of "telling" and somehow ended up with 460 pages! I have since cut it back to about 350.

It is better to have a finished something, than a never ending one.

Get your first draft done, then worry about word count. IMO at the first draft stage, the story is still pretty plastic.

Maybe this tale is indeed a novella, rather than a novel, but I would then concentrate on making it the best novella you can.