I am moving towards completion of The Girl with the Empty Suitcase. That's right, the end is in sight!
I just was talking to a potential editor, and I had to think about word counts.
Exact counts vary greatly, but a basic run-down of word count lengths is as follows:
Flash fiction: less than 1000 words
Short stories: 1000 - 15,000 words
Novellas: 20,000 - 40,000 words
Novels: 40,000 words (and more!)
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There are some great books that you may not even know are novellas. According to goodreads, the following are rated by readers as being the ten best novellas:
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
The Stranger (Albert Camus)
A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Sant-Exupery)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
Word count does not necessarily equal a great novel, nor a bad one.
After some research, I thought I would share some word count categories with you, and the books that fit into those numbers.
Hanging out right around 50,000 words there are such greats as:
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Black Beauty (Anna Sewell)
Jump up to 60,000 and a bit more, and you will find:
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf(
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
The Fault in Our Stars (John Green)
Another jump up, to the 70,000 level, will get you in the company of:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) White Fang (Jack London) Philosopher’s Stone (JK Rowling) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
If you want more words, at 80,000 and so, you will find books like:
The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje) Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank) Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
Craving something a little bit bigger? How about books with 90,000 words or more?
Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan) The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien) Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
If you prefer books that break through that six-digit figures, you might want to check out:
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card) Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
At 110,000 and and so, you'll find:
The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman) Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) My Sisters Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
In 120,000 and 130,000 there are such books as:
Atonement (Ian McEwan) The Return of the King (J. R. R. Tolkien) A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
140,000 and 150,000 word counts include:
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith) Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) Watership Down (Richard Adams) Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood)
Books with 160,000 and 170,000 counts feature such reads as:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinback) Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
If you like even bigger books, you might want to check out books with 180,000 and 190,000 word counts, like these:
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) Little Women (Books 1&2) (Louisa May Alcott) Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
If you like big books, check out these ones, all with word counts over 200,000:
Moby Dick (Herman Melville) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Want something that can help you out with your weight-lifting? Check out these, that are all 300,000 words or longer:
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) Middlemarch (George Eliot) Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Still not long enough for you? You're crazy; I like that.
These ones are 400,000 words or more:
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell) The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)
If Colossus was a book, it might be one of these intimidating reads:
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
So, where does The Girl with the Empty Suitcase belong? The final count won't be in for a little bit longer, but I think it is looking like it will be somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 words.
What about you? Do you like big books?
I'd love to hear your comments, below, or contact me via my site, here. And don't forget to subscribe to get my monthly newsletter! This month is featuring something pretty awesome, if I do say so myself!