“A novel” sounds huge and shapeless, like “the ocean”. And anything without a size is intimidating, or exhausting, or both. So let’s measure it.
The numbers, with the fine print
Novel length is counted in words, not pages, because pages change with the font, the trim size and the mood of whoever’s doing the layout. As a rough guide, a printed book page holds somewhere between 250 and 300 words, so 80,000 words comes to around 300 pages.
These are approximate ranges that get quoted a lot for adult fiction. They vary by publisher, country, decade and the book itself, and there are famous exceptions in both directions. Treat them as a ballpark, not a rule:
- Novels in general: 70,000 to 100,000 words is a comfortable zone.
- Cozy mystery, romance: often a bit shorter, around 60,000 to 90,000.
- Thrillers, crime: roughly 70,000 to 100,000.
- Fantasy and science fiction: usually longer, often 90,000 to 120,000 or more. Building a world takes up room.
- Young adult: all over the place, often 50,000 to 80,000.
Below about 40,000 words, people tend to call it a novella. And if your draft runs way over for your genre, that’s fine. That’s what revision is for.
Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, is a cozy mystery with a romance in it. Its target length is 80,000 words, and that’s plenty to get started.
Why the number is scary (and why it shouldn’t be)
Eighty thousand words, put like that, sounds like “climb eighty thousand stairs”. Nobody climbs eighty thousand stairs. You climb one, then the next, and every so often you stop to enjoy the view.
In a novel, the useful stair isn’t the word. It’s the scene. And there are a lot fewer of those.
From words to scenes
A scene usually runs somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 words, depending on the pace of the book and what happens in it. A chase across the square in the middle of the festival might be done in a thousand. A long conversation in the dark library might need three times that. But 2,000 words per scene is a sensible average to start doing the math.
And the math goes like this:
80,000 words ÷ 2,000 words per scene = 40 scenes.
Forty. A whole novel, forty scenes. Plan one a day and you have your outline in a little over a month. Write one a week and you have a draft in under a year. It’s not the ocean anymore. It’s a big swimming pool.
Tip: the number doesn’t need to be exact. If you end up with 36 or 47, you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s there to give you the size of the house, not to measure every tile.
Where each scene goes
Knowing there are 40 is nice. Knowing where they go is better.
Not every moment in a structure takes the same amount of room. In Wake the Dragon, “All Hell Breaks Loose” (the morning the glass case turns up empty) fits in a single scene. “Now for the Fun Part,” on the other hand, where Mara questions half the town on the pretext of renewing their library cards, takes up a quarter of the book and needs lots of them.
The simple rule: turning points get one scene each, and the long stretches share out the rest according to how much of the book they cover.
How Sunday Plot does it
This is where Sunday Plot does the arithmetic for you. That’s what computers are for.
- You give it a target length. In Settings, or when guided mode asks, “Roughly how long do you want it to be?” It’s not a promise. It’s just for sharing out the scenes.
- On the Structure screen, under “Spread out scenes”, you click “Suggest scenes”. You can change the words per scene (2,000 by default) if your scenes run shorter or longer.
- Sunday Plot creates empty slots. Each single-moment beat gets one scene. The rest are shared among the multi-scene beats, in proportion to how much of the book they cover, with at least one each.
For Wanted: One Dragon and its 80,000 words, that gives the 40 scenes: eight single-moment pieces get one each, and the remaining 32 are split across the six long stretches like this: 4 in “Nothing to See Here,” 4 in “Somebody Else’s Job,” 9 in “Now for the Fun Part,” 4 in “On the Offensive,” 6 in “I Smell Smoke” and 5 in “Go Big or Go Home.” (The finished novel has 41: one on the house, and that’s fine.)
Those scenes show up as candidates: cards with a dashed border and nothing inside. They stop being candidates as soon as you give them a title or a line of “What happens”. If one is extra, delete it. If you need another, add it. And if you regret the whole thing, “Remove empty candidates” puts the structure back the way it was, without touching any you’ve already started.
For today
Pick a number for your novel. Round, rough, provisional: 60,000, 80,000, 100,000. Divide it by 2,000 and see how many scenes you get. Write that number down somewhere you’ll see it. It’s usually a relief.
In Sunday Plot, set it as your target length and try “Spread out scenes” on the Structure screen. Seeing your novel turned into a handful of empty cards, each one in its place, is one of those things that swaps “I don’t know where to start” for “okay, I’ll start with this one”.