By Joyce Herry
From September 1, 2017 my library is organizing a writer’s month. They have programs for writers and for those who are just starting to write, but have problems how to start writing to get their book published.
Some of the subjects are:
- Writing your own history
- How to write an objection letter
- Getting to know your writing style
- The healing power of writing
- Visual writing
- A bookbinder will give instructions how to bind a book.
I don’t think I will follow any of the programs, but I will try to write every day to post on Steemit.
I remember that there is an international month for writing called NanoWriMo every year in November. Here you are encouraged to write a novel in a month. Now that is challenging!
A novel can have about 50,000 words to cover about 175 pages. There are tools to calculate how many words there are in a page.
A rough calculation to do this is to count the words of three full lines on a page in your manuscript. Disregard the indentation. Now add the numbers of words you come up with from these three lines and divide them by 3 to get the average of numbers of 1 line. Then count the number of lines on that single page from top to bottom. Take the outcome of these 2 numbers you come up with, thus the average number of words per 1 line times the number of lines per single page will give you the average number of the total words of that complete page. Generally speaking it could be about 250 to 350 words per page.
Here is a breakdown of the kind of stories with their average words:
- A short story is less than 7,500 words
- A novel (a fictitious prose narrative of book length) is over 40,000 words
- A novella (a long short story) is 17,500 to 40,000 words
- A novelette (a short romantic story) is 7,500 to 17,500 words
- An adult novel is above 100,000 words
- Children’s book is 500 to 10,000 words
Of course you don’t have to stick to these rules. Just write a compelling story and it wouldn’t matter how many words you use to tell the story.
In November I will challenge myself to write the compelling story I have on the shelf, but first I need to do some research and interviews for my non-fiction book. That can take about two months, just in time to “participate” in the NanoWriMo writing month. This month I will dedicate myself to post more frequently on Steemit. I am bilingual; I think and write in Dutch and English. I have some knowledge of other languages, but these two main languages are the languages I feel most comfortable with.
Image source: http://www.freepik.com/free-photo/fingers-note-report-journalist-filling_1088221.htm#term=writing%20hand&page=1&position=9