The End

For the next two weeks, we’ll be talking about things that are too small to really stretch out into a novel. Unlike with short stories, novels have a massive number of words you can work with. Usually, they’ll at least stretch up to 100,000 words before anyone thinks it’s too long. And really, you can go a lot longer than that, too. Many of my books are closer to 200,000 words, if you were curious. That means I have a lot of space to work with when it comes to fleshing everything out. But there are things, as you might imagine, that are just too small to stretch out into a full-length novel. Today, we discuss the first.

Somebody’s Dying

Okay, so, people very frequently die in novels. I’ve had some backlash about that in a few of my books, though I never kill a character without reason. Ever

Thing is, that can’t be the whole point of your novel. The whole story can’t be focused on the death of a single character. It’s just too small an ordeal to pull 100,000 words out of, generally speaking. There’s not a lot that goes along with the death of a character, when you really think about it. They’re there on one page, and they’re not on the next. Done. 

Yes, there can be a great deal that the other characters have to go through in order to get past that death, but in my opinion that’s more of a topic for a short story. Novels like multiple plot lines and varying structures, not singular notions of limited structure.

So my suggestion, if you want to write a story about the death of a character, is to make it a short one. Try to focus on that specific incident and what goes on with it, on the lives of the other characters who will be affected by it. But don’t stretch it out too long. Don’t try to write a downer novel that forces the story to stretch out into novel length. 

Your readers won’t want to keep reading, especially if we know the whole time that there’s a character who has to die at the end.

That’s never easy to read.

[love]

{Rani D.}