It Doesn’t Have To Be Long, It Just Has To Be Good

I started this novel in December of 2009. By December of 2010 I finished a first draft of 247 pages and felt pretty damn good about it. I put it aside for the holidays thinking that I’d read it over once more in January, make a few changes where I needed to (I knew it wasn’t PERFECT after all) and be done. Happy New Year!

As I’m sure you’ve guessed, it didn’t quite work out that way. By mid January I was back down to about 150 pages. A month later I was down to 40. I basically scrapped my entire first draft, and yet, I still call it my first draft. Why? For one thing, I learned so much about my characters that even though the pages didn’t make the cut, I still think it counts, and for another, calling what I’m working on now my second draft just seems much more fair.

I’ve simply been working on this baby too long, and have written too many pages to go around saying I’m still working on a first draft, but here’s the weird part – it’s only 170 pages long. My nearly completed second draft is way shorter than my first.

True, these 170 pages are immeasurably better than the 247 of my first draft, and I’m not done, but I worry that the story won’t be long enough to count as real novel. My husband likes to remind me that it doesn’t have to be long, it just has to be good, and I know he’s right, but still, in the literary world, a book has to have a certain word count to be taken seriously.

I try not to worry too much about it. If it’s one thing this process has taught me it’s that the revision process holds many surprises. If I don’t like the finished product for any reason, I’ll just keep revising.