So Ive been writing a book for a while now. I made a general blueprint and have been rewriting/expanding apon it as ive been going along in my first draft. Its been going smooth, but Ive realized that about ~paragraph in the blueprint can equate to 5 in the first draft. The Draft is 90% paraphrashing, not counting dialogue. Aka, rough descriptions of areas and actions between characters. An Average fantasy novel can be around 80k words, but if I continue at this pace, The first 5 chapters ( what ive written to in the blueprint) will be at 90k. I havent even gotten near the 1/4th point of the story I have in mind for the blueprint. Have I bitten off more than I can chew with this one? Should I just say "Fuck it" and keep going?
This question is hard to answer because we don't know the content of the word count. If a lot of that content is substance-less waffle or a confusing mess, then yeah it could probably do with a trim. Basically I think you should be trimming your story based on the quality of the writing, not based on an arbitrary "good" quantity of words. Edit: Just as a note, the Harry Potter series of books apparently had over 1 million words in total and plenty of people are perfectly happy to read them through several times over, so your measly 90k really doesn't seem like "too much" by comparison. Plus, it goes to show that so long as the story is enjoyable to the reader they won't care about the word count. I say just focus on making your novel good.
Just write what you want to write. There is no point in trying to conform to a published novel standard when the first draft is not even done yet.
you can write a webnovel I'm sure some go up to 1 million words as long as the fantasy is nice enough (like original fresh ideas, sufficient world building), I will be willing to read a book now matter how long it is. however, if you are making a hardcopy, I guess there's the issue of thickness
Considering I once wrote 4 pages worth of insults to one of my teachers, I would say there is never too much words
Finish the story and then recheck again and again.. Any standardization should be done at the final stages to meet the publication requirements that's all...don't weigh your novel based on word count
You should write your story until you get to an ending point. Here is a word count guide by genre: https://thewritelife.com/how-many-words-in-a-novel/
The point of "too many words" is when you start repeating yourself, run with a pointless tangent for an extended period, or otherwise cause what you're writing lose track of what it was trying to do previously. While you can make a minimum and maximum length for a chapter, any may want to because any story with a chapter that's one to five sentences long or 20,000+ words long needs to evaluate the length of it's chapters. Additionally, I don't know your writing style. Sure, from what you've presented it seems like you come up with a rough draft, and then fill in the dialogue ends up being 70% of the end story. However, you have also stated that you've only written the character introductions, one of the most vocal part of the story, so long as the story doesn't immediately suggest that the characters already know each other and are happy to travel together. You have to give the characters in question personalities, introduce them to the other characters, give them reasons to travel together and have their personalities both clash AND mesh together in interesting ways. All of which makes dialogue, and all of which makes the story better. If I had to give a suggestion, it would be to reread through what you've already written, see where there are points at which you can cause breaks in the story, and use those breaks to increase the number of chapters in your story. Additionally, check your rough draft to see if you can separate your story into smaller "books" that would each be interesting in and of themselves. This potential suggestion is made mostly because you are asking for advice about whether your story is too long (we have people who read Cultivation Novels on here, and those are purposefully written to pad out the middle of the plot, taking 10 chapters on things that 1 or 2 chapters would have sufficed on, eventually adding nearly 200+ chapters to their story, at a minimum). TL: DR = If the content is there, on track, and the story is interesting enough, there is no such thing as "too long", though you might want to look into segmenting your chapters, and making the story into a multiple-book series.