Talking Shop: On the Perils of Organic Novel Writing • By Eric Dontigney

Photo by Philippe Donn from Pexels

For the last few months, I’ve been posting on here about my Writing Challenge and appending those updates with one about my space opera, Rinn’s Run. I’d originally set a target length of about 100,000 words for Rinn’s Run. I picked that number because it’s more or less industry standard for science fiction novels. I’ll just write to order, I thought to myself.

Oh, foolish, foolish writer.

There were some things I hadn’t really counted on when I embarked on this journey into space opera writing. First, I had zero plan when I started. I wrote the first 5000 words on a lark. I hadn’t given any real thought to how it would end. I’ve always known in the past, in general or specific, how my novels would end. I just assumed that I’d figure it out as I went. And, I did! Yay for correct assumptions. Of course, I was about 50,000 words into the novel when I figured out how I wanted it to end and…big shocker…I hadn’t really been writing the story on an arc to fit that end. At least, not and wrap it up at the 100,000-word mark.

So, I started thinking about how I could maybe wrap it up if I gave myself an extra 10,000 or 20,000 words. Yeah, that’s getting long, but not too unreasonably long…at least not on a The Wheel of Time or The Stormlight Archives scale. The more I thought about what it would take to make the ending I had in mind happen, the longer the book would have to be. By the time I’d fleshed out a partial mental outline, I was estimating that the book would likely run in the 140,000-word range. Plus, I’d have to gloss over some things that would likely make the ending feel rushed. I wouldn’t like it. I suspect that readers wouldn’t like it. To do it right, I figured I’d need something more like 150,000 to 170,000 words.

Estimates vary, but I generally figure around 300 words per page for your average paperback. At 150,000 to 170,000 words, that’s a 500+ page doorstop. That is an unreasonable length, to my mind, for a space opera. So, I went back to what I’d written so far and really examined the story. Then, I considered where I wanted my hero to end up. I had a realization. This was going to be a novel in two parts. What I’d written so far was following its own natural arc toward a kind of mini-conclusion. It’s not a resolution for the whole story, but it is a resolution for some key plot points.

Even more importantly, I was going to roll up on the natural break in the story somewhere around the 75,000-word mark. I think that is a very reasonable length for a space opera. So, rather than eventually release a tome you can’t comfortably hold in your hands while you read, I’m going to split Rinn’s Run into two parts. I’m expecting both parts to run about 75,000-80,000 words, which puts us right in the comfortable-to-hold, 250-page book range. It also means you’ll get my best version of the story, instead of my “trying to artificially hit a target word count” version. 

The other upside is that I should be done with part one in the next couple of weeks. That will let me get started on the editing while I work on part 2 and finish up a couple of smaller projects that have been languishing on the back burner.

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.