Novels - How Long?

 C. S. Laskin over at Live Thrive Write blog has answers to this question with her How to Determine Your Novel’s Time Span :

    Genre (as mentioned) should determine the time span and pacing of the story. A thoughtful, slow-building relational story may cover more time (months) as readers stroll through the pages and grow to care for the characters. Keep in mind, there is always a plot goal building and rising to an important, resolving climax in every story!
    Stakes: Every story should have high stakes for the character because it’s centering on what that character cares most about. However, global stakes with a ticking clock should be packaged in a story with a short fuse, and stories that are more character-driven should take longer to allow for those characters to deepen along with their relationships and conflict.
    Plot: Be careful regarding your plot. If you have Joe dealing with an issue in his hometown, then partway into the story you relocate him elsewhere and he has to basically start a new life, you may be dragging out your plot goal and story over way too much time for there to be a tight build of story toward the climax.

The key is to keep the plot concise, and while the goal may change as the story progresses, every step should be leading toward that ultimate climax. Often long plots covering a lot of time reveal boring, unnecessary scenes and action that aren’t directly related to or impacting the plot goal. Again, this is all about focusing on the premise. What the story is really about.

When I started on "One Dead Blonde" (still exiled in Evansville), I wanted a crime story and in my opinion such a novel should not go past 300 pages. Thank you, Robert B. Parker for putting that idea in my head.

It seems right to hitch on here Lincoln Michel's How Novellas Became Novels from his Counter Craft on Substack. He goes into the history of how difficult it was for Americans to publish novellas, then he asks:

What caused this tipping point allowing novella-length texts to be published as standalone novels?

One factor is likely the shift to online sales. When a bookstore browser picks up a slim print volume with their hands, it feels slight. Some surely felt they weren’t getting the bang for the buck American consumers always expect, no matter how silly that is to apply to literature. On the other hand, digital thumbnail covers don’t give you a sense of a book’s size. Page count is less of a factor.

This is speculative, yet I wonder if the rise of audiobooks and ebook shifted things. They’re bought online, of course, but also I wonder if readers gravitate toward shorter audio and ebooks. There’s a sense of accomplishment from reading, say, 50 pages of a hardcover tome that seeing your ebook % finished move from 5% to 6% doesn’t produce. For audiobooks, listening to a 1,000-page book read aloud is a daunting task. Your morning commute’s listen for months.

Whether this affects Ms. Laskin's advice is beyond me to answer, except to think there is more of an opportunity for shorter works and to pace them accordingly. More specifically, Mr. Michel makes the point of how science fiction does more with novellas, and this fits in with Ms.Laskin's advice about paying attention to genre.

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