Working on my own and just hit , words. I think the daily totals, what you put out in work for a single day are important, what the length of the story is, in total, in unimportant, as a number.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. You should share the standard industry formula for determining word count, because the actual document word count determined by the program, such as Microsoft Word, is misleading, for lack of a better term, and most experienced literary agents and publishing house editors typically want the formulated number, which is averaged based on proper formatting font type and size, line spacing, indents, margins, etc.
If my manuscript is coming in at pages it would be acceptable at 70, words using the per page method but the docs count may be as much as 6,, words less and so not hitting the ideal mark. Which would be best to use in that case? Hi Nancy. Word counts are usually rounded up or down, and we do account for the minor differences some word processing programs might have.
Thanks for the comprehensive post! All the fantasy novels I know of are at least twice as long. Animal Farm seemed Sooo much longer when I had to read it in school! Gone with the Wind worked for me. Three times in a row. I am trying to figure out if my book is a novella or novel and I am finding discrepancies, but the list above seems about right considering. I am wondering though about the list of established novels.
Here it says Animal Farm is just under 30, but another source I found said the same book was about 36, Thanks for such a great post! Thanks very much for sharing all this useful information. My thinking was that page count could change, but word count should remain the same no matter what. Reaching the scene in which Carraway suddenly remembers it's his thirtieth birthday, Smith was filled with questions about what kind of a person Gatsby's narrator really was.
The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick's story," he says. In , by then a published author in his forties, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he'd have to wait until to publish it. Smith points to a quote from one of Fitzgerald's contemporaries as having provided the key to understanding Carraway.
It's a far cry from the riotous razzmatazz of all that partying, yet Carraway is, Smith suggests, the reason Fitzgerald's novel remains read. We have to respond to and understand Gatsby and, as we do so, remain aware that we're approaching him through Nick's very particular perspective, and through Nick's very ambivalent relationship to Gatsby, which is simultaneously full of praise and full of severe criticism, even at some moments contempt," he says.
Like Smith, Cain first encountered the novel as a student. It was a different era — the s — but even so, little attention was paid to Nick.
Cain recalls instead talk of symbolism — the legendary green light, for example, and Gatsby's fabled automobile. It's a reminder that, in a way, the education system is as much to blame as pop culture for our limited readings of this seminal text. It may be a Great American Novel but, at fewer than pages, its sublimely economical storytelling makes its study points very easy to access. Ironically, given that this is a novel of illusion and delusion, in which surfaces are crucial, we all too often overlook the texture of its prose.
As Cain puts it, "I think when we consider The Great Gatsby, we need to think about it not just as a novel that is an occasion or a point of departure for us to talk about big American themes and questions, but we have to really enter into the richness of Fitzgerald's actual page-to-page writing. We have to come to Gatsby, yes, aware of its social and cultural significance, but also we need to return to it as a literary experience. Cain re-reads the novel every two or three years but frequently finds himself thinking about it in between — last summer, for instance, when US President Biden, accepting the Democratic nomination at the DNC, spoke of the right to pursue dreams of a better future.
The American Dream is, of course, another of Gatsby's Big Themes, and one that continues to be misunderstood. Sometimes even a classic falls short of our dreams — frankly, the less said about twinkle-bells of sunshine and breastfeeding wonder, the better. But for the most part Fitzgerald's prose is a kind of experiment in restrained extravagance.
Just as the style is nearly paradoxical in its ability to cut both ways, so are the novel's meanings. It is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight.
It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life. As Fitzgerald's editor Max Perkins wrote in it is "a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism". The hard facts of power and economics play out against the mythological promises of fantasy and ideology. Gatsby learns the hard way that being found out is inevitable, escape from his past impossible; but Nick beats a retreat back home, escaping back into his own nostalgic past.
We find ourselves surveying the waste and wreckage after the party ends, but ready to carouse some more. Gatsby is a fable about betrayal — of others, and of our own ideals. The concept that a New World in America is even possible, that it won't simply reproduce the follies and vices of the Old World, is already an illusion, a paradise lost before it has even been conceived.
By the time Gatsby tries to force that world to fulfil its promise, the dream is long gone. But that doesn't stop him from chasing "the green light" of wealth and status, the dangled promise of power that can only create a corrupt plutocracy shored up by vast social inequality. If that sounds familiar, it should: our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald's. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction," he insisted, adding later, "I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works".
He wasn't in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. The materialistic world of Gatsby is defined by social politics in a metropolitan America. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win. As the eminent critic Lionel Trilling observed in "Fitzgerald, more than anyone else of his time, realised the rigorousness of the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity.
And it is certainly true that if Fitzgerald was a socialist, he was the original champagne socialist. He was so far ahead of his time that we are only just catching up with him. Fitzgerald even recognised our obsession with youth, writing in of Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night : "she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth.
Gatsby is destroyed by the founding American myth: that the marketplace can be a religion, that the material can ever be ideal. At the beginning of the novel Fitzgerald writes of Gatsby's capacity for hope; at the end he writes of man's capacity for wonder. And the distance that the novel traverses is the defeat of that capacity, its surrender to our capacity for cynicism.
All that enchantment withers up and blows away, skittering with the leaves across Gatsby's dusty lawn. In the unforgettable closing passage of The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald makes it clear that if his story is about America, it is also a universal tale of human aspiration.
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