I've been taking a fiction-writing class one night a week for the past two months, and last night was my turn to have a story workshopped. It was a great experience, and a lot of fun to work on a short story again. And it got me thinking about what it would take to convert my short story into a novel.
In just over a month, including many re-writes and edits, I wrote a 4,500-word story - about 14 double-spaced, typed pages. As a baseline, the average published novel (if there is such a thing) is around 80,000 words - or approximately 250 words per page for 320 pages. Obviously, the number of pages depends on font type and size, book size, margins, etc.
Infinite Jest, 123 pages (11.4% of the novel) of which I have now conquered, is 1,079 pages, and its page size is much larger and type size smaller than most published work. Amazon's text stats say the novel is 484,001 words - or about EIGHT times as long as a typical novel.
By way of comparison, Stephen King's The Stand, the longest novel I'd ever read before Infinite Jest is 462,138 words. War and Peace is 568,880.
Now, here's the amazing thing: DFW wrote Infinite Jest in only three years - and his first draft, according to this article, was three times longer! That's 40,333 words per month....or about NINE times my meager output. It's just mind-boggling.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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3 comments:
I don't think that your short story was a "meager output". Ha!
from, SP
That Text Stats thing on Amazon is awesome - had to look up Atlas Shrugged (longest book I've read at 1,200 pages.) Certainly not as difficult as Infinite Jest but damn long - 565,223 words. Wonder how long it too Rand to write that sucker...
By the way, when will your short be posted???
David Foster-Wallace cut Infinite Jest down by a third, not to a third (which would make the draft two times longer, btw).
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