What is the largest number of words you’ve ever written for a single story?

What is the most you’ve ever written for a single story. This counts for proofread stories, and non proofread stories. Stories you’ve shared, and ones you haven’t shared yet. Just now I’ve reached my max ever written for a single story at 80,000 words, but frustratingly it’s still not even halfway done. I really hope I can actually finish something someday.

 

~38,800 words

 

Written as in authored or translated? None in both cases but I have written a 20 page paper before.

 

Maybe you should change the question to pages. It will be less precise, but more people should knoe the answer.

Well i only know because of a thesis I wrote.

 

The average number of words, 12pt font single-spaced, in a Word document page is 500. Double-spaced is 250. The average words for a page in a book is also 250, assuming the author isn't padding pages by increasing font size, margins, and spacing.

You can guesstimate that way.

 

Personally I check the word count fairly often to judge my progress. Sometimes I set daily goals by word count, but lately I've just set my goal to write some everyday.

Anyways, I once read on the interned somewhere that the average paperback book was 80,000 words so I've been trying to reach that number for awhile now, but now that I finally have met that number it's a little concerning how little progress the story has actually made. At least it definitely doesn't seem like a whole book of story progress. So I guess word count isn’t everything then.

 

Once you get it done, you can go back and find appropriate arcs to split it by. If you plan to publish to somewhere like Amazon, you'd already be re-reading and editing it. By that point it wouldn't be too difficult to change or add bits to make a beginning and ending sequence for those arcs so it appears like a regular book.

 

I'm at 69k on my current one that I'm writing and have collated before the first rewrite though I know that it's more than that since that doesn't include the Chapter 1 rewrite which adds 3 extra pages and chapter 13 which is in progress and adds another 7 pages. Though it shouldn't come to more than 100k. Though I do plan on hitting 500k words at least!

 

109000 words

 

Thanks for the advice. I'm not actually too sure what I want to do with this story once it's finished (if I finish it). Mainly right now I just want to finally finish writing one of the stories I've thought up, whatever the final results are. If worse comes to worse I can still just post it somewhere on the internet, and call it done.

As for arcs in my story. The conflict in the story so far is a bit weak, so the sense of arcs is a bit weak. As for why the conflict is weak it’s probably mostly because my MC is weak in a world where strength matters (and I don’t want him to have too much plot armor). I didn’t start him off with much in the way of destiny juice, cheats or talent, so most of the book so far has been him slowly developing (and exposition). The story kind of has a slice of life feel right now, but once the war finally starts, and his hard work starts paying off, I think the story will probably become much more exciting. I’m not sure how many readers who like action would be willing to stick around that long thought, but either way the priority right now is just finishing something for once.

 

My main novel is about to reach 50K and I haven't even finished the 1st arc.

 

Flashbacks/Flashforwards might be the way to bridge the gap. Having a chapter here or there where he's in the war and then reminiscing about a past event of how he got to his current skill level would be relevant if you are going to be doing major editing.

An easy fix would be just to have a prologue with a similar event and have him thinking about his humble beginnings so that readers know it was a slow and steady process, but it'll be exciting once he gains enough momentum later on in the book.

 

What @Alvastar said.

Best IET work I read(I do read better stuff than IET's work, but this is still solid) was Seeking the Flying Sword Path for skipping the annoying phase where the MC is a clueless newbie, yet we still got explanations MC already knew delivered by him interacting with his hometown friends and people he knows even if MC himself at this point was already at the stage where he begins his real gains ( later half of first realm, found a good backwoods legacy somewhere, experienced due to wandering and serving in war for a time,....) as a xianxia protag.

 

Currently at around 360k for my first story and, 160k for my second one. First one is around prologue + arc1 maybe 2 in, while the second one is prologue + arc 1. I'll just add that by prologue I mean the initial arc, not a chapter or two. Both stories are quite long-lasting in terms of content I have planned and are more in the form of web novel than volumes, but they can be comfortably split.

As for a bonus, my single, biggest chapter, reached 7.9k words for the first novel (average is 6k)

 

Right now I am sitting at 260k for first and 60k for second. For my more traditional novel I'm working on 60k also. Making steady progress for all of them.

 

Around 3000 per chapter so around 9000 in my short story. My thesis is obviously long though 100 pages.

 

I tend to write about 40,000-100,000 words per project before deeming it shit. Thereby dropping the story and beginning on another one - only to repeat the cycle.