Once I had a beginning and ending worked out, it was time to decide upon length. According to many sources, a salable, entry-level high fantasy novel should aim for 80k to 120k words.

So how do you know how many words you are going to write? Unfortunately, there’s no (immediately apparent) hard and fast rules for hitting a target word-length. There’s no “average length for a chapter” either, because chapters end and begin for all sorts of different reasons. A 120,000 word novel can have 30 chapters, and an 80,000 word novel can just as easily have 50. I even read about an avant-garde writer that made one of his chapters a single sentence.

None-the-less, I tried bridging the beginning of the book to the end using chapter titles and brief descriptions of what happens in each of them. I failed miserably. I was only able to make it to chapter twelve before I got stuck.

There was still a massive gorge between the beginning and end of my book. I needed to build a better bridge to help get the reader (and myself) across. Read the rest of this entry »