Resolving the Word Count Conundrum
So I got caught up in an interesting debate on twitter on the other night, largely revolving around the question of whether or not 50K actually constituted a novel-length work and the difference between answering yes to that question, answering yes, but it may be extraordinarily hard to sell, depending on your genre, and answering no, it’s a goddamn novella. If that sounds like a waste of time…yes. If it sounds like something you have passionate feelings about…yes, it’s that too. Writers get passionate about wordcounts. We get passionate about what they mean and where the arbitrary lines between form may be, and occasionally we spew some truly stupid shit in the name of trying to unravel its mystery. It gets even weirder when you start considering the importance of genre on the discussion. For example, I used to think short stories were around 3,000 words long, largely because that was usually the upper word-count on any short stories we submitted during my
