Why it's so difficult to predict the length of a new story
Discovery writing, outlining, and the magic of revisions
Andrew LiVecchi is an author of epic fantasy inspired by a lifelong obsession with ancient and medieval history, mythology, and classic literature. His novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess, is available for purchase at Amazon.
A week ago, I posted a meme on my Bluesky account that really seemed to resonate with other SFF authors. It'd be a stretch to say it went "viral," but it did easily bring in more likes, reposts, and comments than anything else I've posted there.
Lots of other authors chimed in, saying they also struggle with estimating wordcounts, that they too had begun short stories that turned into novellas, novellas into novels, and novels into trilogies. Planned trilogies, we must assume by this logic, inevitably turn into Wheel of Time-length epic series.
I originally thought Son of the Thunder Goddess would be a short story or novelette of maybe 10,000 words. It ended up being double that. My as yet unpublished medieval fantasy novel was originally supposed to be a longer novella and that ended up, after numerous rewrites and revisions, coming in at 140,000 words.
According to the replies on my Bluesky post, I am in good company. And this got me thinking about why it is so difficult for many writers to accurately predict how long a new project will be. My hypothesis is that this is comes with the territory of being a discovery writer.
For those unfamiliar with this term, it’s common in the author world to talk of writers as falling into one of two opposing categories. Either you are a discovery writer (aka pantser/gardener) or an outliner (aka plotter/architect). The discovery writer approaches their story with only a partial idea of where it will go. They discover the plot, characters, and themes as they work their way through the first draft. The outliner, on the other hand, lays out everything beforehand and knows exactly what is going to happen in the story before they ever write a single word of their first draft.
Brandon Sanderson talks about this discovery/outlining dichotomy in his most recent writing lectures (which are excellent by the way. I highly recommend them to anyone interested in getting into or improving their writing, especially SFF). And he makes the point that it’s really more of a continuum than a binary. Most discovery writers will have some kind of plan or outline in mind, and most outliners leave elements to be figured out as they write, even if it’s just how certain specific scenes will play out.
I fall mostly into the discovery writer camp. I'll begin with a compelling idea, usually one that I've been mulling over for several months. Then I’ll create a very sparse outline that sketches out where I think the story will ultimately end and what the overall arc of each act will look like. I’ll sometimes even break down the plot further by laying out the major story beats. But ultimately, once I actually start writing, I always end up off-script. For me, the joy of writing comes from letting the story unfold naturally. I like to discover what my story is really all about as I’m writing.
This means that I produce extremely rough and slightly incoherent first drafts. But that’s where revision comes in. And revision is actually my favourite part of writing. The process of producing a first draft is marked by uncertainty, self-doubt, and mental and creative blocks. It takes a lot of grit and discipline and banging your head against your desk to push through and put words to the page when you don’t know what needs to happen next. When I revise, on the other hand, I already know what the story is supposed to be, so I can take all the epiphanies I had at the end of writing the first draft and weave them into the earlier parts of the book. By the time I’m done drafts three or four, it should look like I knew where I was going all along. That’s the beauty of revision.
For instance, in the first draft of Son of the Thunder Goddess, Athewain and Nennian were not related. I think I got to about halfway through the rough draft before I decided that their dynamic worked better with them as brothers. Forging ahead, I wrote them as brothers from that point forward, and changed their relationship at the beginning of the book in my revisions.
All of this means that I need to write a story out fully before I can actually see it. By outlining, I can get a sense for where a story is going but not how long it will take to get there. And this means my predictions about wordcount are consistently very low during the outlining stage. It’s not that the final products end up bloated (or at least I don’t think they are) but that I underestimate how many pages it takes to do my ideas justice.
Perhaps predicting wordcount is a skill that develops with time. That’s what Sanderson believes, at any rate. In those same lectures I mentioned earlier, he maintains that only once you finish your sixth book or so will you get better at knowing upfront how long it will be. So here’s hoping!
But in the meantime, you might want to take anything I say about how long a new project is going to be with a grain of salt.
Question for the writers: are you more of an outliner or a discovery writer? And do you also struggle with predicting a new story’s length? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment on Substack.
