“Like with anything, an exceptional manuscript can result in exceptions to the rule,” says Jackie Bates. Length of a book is typically associated with its size—specifically page count—leading many to assume the largest and thickest book equates to its length. I hesitate to cut it more but I'm sitting it sit while I write the sequel before I take another look. In literary novels, there are no such things as rules. Certainly, there have been hugely ambitious epics published to great acclaim. b. Pertaining to books and written compositions; also, in a narrower sense, pertaining to, or having the characteristics of that kind of written composition which has value on account of its qualities of form. A "single work" includes works thought of as one novel by the author but published in multiple volumes for reasons of convenience. Literary novels are still novels, not academic papers. Famous novels have been extremely long, like 530,000 words for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables or 420,000 words for George R.R. I hardly ever watch movies. Why? I think we mix up realism with non-escapist and imaginative with escapist, they aren’t necessarily exclusive opposites: Martell’s “Life of Pi” was a fabulist tale, but not an escapist one – it took you along under a set of assumptions it had set up in the reader and then sharply removed those blinkers by taking the novel in a whole new (dark) direction. Also, publishing your novel independently has become not just viable but (arguably) preferable. I'm coming in at 65k for my literary fiction novel. Literary agent Paula Munier says a 90,000 word count is “the sweet spot for debut fiction.” Neither too long nor too short, this book length signals a novelist’s competency and knowledge of the publishing market to prospective agents and editors. Sounds strange and dreamy each time I see it. hope so. Have I learned anything? "name": "How many words should a romance novel be? What used to be simply “novels,” are now categorized as “literary novels.”. The absence of any formal marking of word boundaries means that it would be difficult to mechanically determine if such a phrase consists of two, three, or four words without knowing Chinese. Good literary fiction has a plot. Some things can be inferred.” — Jackie Bates, 5) Edit out adverbs in favor of stronger verbs But, hey, things still “happen.”, Writing a gripping plot is important in genre fiction. All you need to understand here is that literary novelists have more space in which to explore theme than genre novelists do. Anyway, X would be the reason that that part of the book exists…everything in that section is there to support X. X is important to the book and this is the part where it happens. Literary fiction is more character-driven and less concerned with a fast-paced plot than genre fiction. "@type": "Answer", 17 is that short and it's basically all dialogue. I personally look for well written stories, that make use of good language, however I recognize that there’s a place for the book that nothing more than whatever words get the story across with no regard for those words except that they make sence and aren’t boring or redundant. So anyway, instead of feeling like you’re going nowhere slowly, you’ll feel like you’re going somewhere (albeit in uneven loosely defined chunks)…but it will be a lot of somewhere’s…a lot of somewhere’s that all lead to the same end goal: a finished book. Though many literary novels don’t exactly make for great beach reading. I, too, love nice fat novels and often come away from skimpy reads feeling "books don’t have enough in them”—like Maggie Tulliver in one of my favourite novels, The Mill on the Floss (word count 205,616). According to NaNoWriMo, manuscripts must be over 50k words to qualify. The literary genre represented by novels. “In the New York agencies I worked for, it was rare to see a 120,000-word manuscript avoid the slush pile. See the summary at, Prague Public Library catalogue: F. L. Věk (in five volumes), Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, Anniversaries. Literary fiction is more likely to break the wider fictional rules, too. He has also been an abridger, literary agent, writer, book doctor, and ghostwriter. If readers of crime novels, for example, expect a body to appear within the first three chapters, your own crime novel had better not disappoint them. I’ve always enjoyed science or (more broadly) speculative fiction, and even though this genre is well-established and includes (arguably) some of the greatest literary works, there is still a tendency to poo-poo it amongst ‘literary’ experts. Publishers' readers are lazy, they won't plough through a War-and-Peace-style odyssey.