Writers know it’s not the size of the story that matters, but how effectively we tell it. Usually a story is however many words/pages/paragraphs/sentences that it needs to be. Sometimes, however, we do aim for a particular word goal. As you have seen on this website, once a month we aim to write a story in 1,000 words. In November, we all try to write at least 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month.
It’s true, we know that size doesn’t matter, but sometimes we like to brag about the longest thing we’ve ever written.
I’m not a very prolific writer, so the longest thing I’ve written is just (kind of short) novel length: a little more than 65,000 words. I still can’t decide if this is just something about me as a writer, or indicative of the sort of plots I tackle.
With several 50,000ish word stories under my belt, last year I decided I was going to attempt my first full-length book; a 50k word novel is really more of a novella. It took me three months of writing pretty much every day, but in the end, the draft ended up being 107,000 words. It may be longer or shorter once it’s edited, but it is the longest thing I’ve ever written.
I’ve written one complete novel that was around 80,000 words. This was about 15 years ago, and it wasn’t very good. Since then, I have tried to write a couple of novels, but petered out before finishing. My most recent attempt from November’s National Novel Writing Month was over 50,000 words, but remains unfinished … for now.
The longest piece I’ve written so far is a post-apocalyptic YA novel of about 76,300 words, entitled You Can Believe It. I tried to keep it shorter. I really did – I killed off at least two characters prematurely and was forced to resuscitate them by members of several writing groups. They insisted that I was imposing cruel and unusual punishment on those poor characters – kids, actually – and to bring them back to life immediately. And so I did. And so the novel stretched on about 20K words longer than I’d planned. And so it’s my first experimental Amazon KDP Select novel, which I may pull the plug on after the minimum three months in the program, unless it suddenly catches on and does well
Kill Creek Road is right around 75,000 words. That is by far the longest thing I’ve written. I bought in to the traditional model of writing education. I wrote a lot of short stories in the name of learning the craft before I attempted a full-length book. I am writing a second novel titled Heaven’s Edge. It’s a hard-boiled science fiction concept that I am trying to map out for three books, Heaven’s Edge, A Halo’s Slip, and To Hell and Back. If it goes the way I am expecting, all three books will be on the short side for novels. I’ve written a few full-length screenplays, including a sequel to Kill Creed Road, but I couldn’t tell you what the word count’s are. They are all around a hundred pages. Overall, I still consider myself a writer of short fiction, but I find myself thinking more about longer works.
The longest thing I’ve written was my last completed novel. I started it during National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, but by the time I finished it, it was over 90k.
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