Short story or Novel? Knowing when to stop writing.


As someone who gets a lot of ideas, the concept of story length is a somewhat fraught subject.

When I start putting the contents of my mind’s eye down, I have no clue where it will all end up.

Let me give you a couple of examples.


When I first saw Andorra Pett, inappropriately dressed for a space station and desperate to start a new life, I had no idea that I would write half a million words about her. And counting.



Or when I met Dave Travise, who knew that his tale of love and loss would spawn a series of his own, two spin-off series featuring characters from his life and several other connected short stories.

I certainly didn’t.

My novels range in length from just over 40k to just under 100k. I don’t decide that figure, I simply stop writing when there’s nothing more to say.

And as that’s my characters decision, it’s final.


Then there are my new projects. My Sci-fi/Crime Noir, Another Rainy Night in Helcon City started life as a drabble, based on a single-word prompt. It’s now over 10k words. As is All By Myself, a tale of survival and first contact, currently being serialised on Medium.

Because things tend to expand so quickly, I now approach every new project with the view that it might be a whole series, which leads me to my problem.


Sometimes, there isn’t enough and I find that the whole thing fizzles out after a few thousand words. This bothers me, when it shouldn’t really.

After all, it’s impractical to assume that I can write a full novel for every idea I have. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for that.

The trick is knowing when to cut your losses, stop staring into space (?) waiting for more and move on to the next project.

After all, once there’s enough to make sense, you can always publish and get people reading it. If they like it enough and ask for more, it can energise you into carrying on.


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