Once, when I was a teenager, I wrote a story for a contest online. What made this story different from every other piece of prose I had written up to that point was that it had a 500 word limit. After months of writing, rewriting, and editing, the story was 499 words long, and there was nothing in it that didn’t advance the plot. There was no need to double up on adjectives, because each one described its noun perfectly. Ambiguous ideas were scrapped because they would require too much explanation. It was the best thing I had ever written.
Back when I first started writing novels, publishers insisted on a word/page limit of between 150 and 200 pages of Courier New font for young adult historical fiction. The 200 page (roughly 50,000 words) mark was the absolute maximum. It seems these days that those limits are no longer being enforced by publishers—especially on authors that have been well received. Unfortunately, this, combined with the phenomenon of increasing book lengths in the fantasy genre, has led even authors who have written some really fantastic stuff in the past to get sloppy. Continue reading
Therefore I Geek 