Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 28

You hit your 50,000 word mark! Congratulations. Are you done?

Depends. Is your story over?

Here are the final word counts for my “50,000” word novels:

• 2020: 163,000 (done, fully revised)
• 2021: 113,000 (80-90% done)
• 2022: 155,000 (70-80% done)
• 2023: 197,000 (done, in revision)

Oh, and in between NaNoWriMo 2021 and 2022, I wrote another 244,000-word novel. (Sure, that sounds like a lot, but that’s not even half the size of War and Peace, right? It’s a little less ridiculous than it sounds because it’s actually two books that are mirror images of one another, à la the movie Rashomon.)

Of course, being able to (or cursed with the ability to) write over 400 words about a table helps immensely during NaNoWriMo. But Chris Baty in No Plot? No Problem! strongly suggests you finish your novel at the 50,000-word mark—he even says your last two words to put you at 50k should be “The End.”

(Not that you, as someone who now knows how to write a novel, would ever actually put that at the end of your novel.)

Baty has a point. If you write your 50k and then stop because you hit the word count but your novel doesn’t have a complete arc, there’s nothing wrong with that. My first novel wasn’t done at 50k; it was starting to feel that way around 70k and its first draft ended up being 85k. Baty advises what he does because of what you see in the middle two above (2021 & 2022, which are unfinished): once November is over, it’s easy to put the book aside and never get to it again. His idea is that it’s better to have a finished fat novella than an unfinished novel.

It depends on you. If you know you’re that type, then by all means finish it at 50,000. I’m actually pretty good at hanging on to things, so when my first November was over and I still had a lot to write, I kept at it and had my 50k done on November 27 and the first draft finished on December 10th. The two unfinished ones are both only lacking a finish on one of their two major plot lines. They’ll get finished once the first book is on the shelves—in fact, the 10-20% left of the second book is the fun part I’ve been putting off writing as a reward to myself.

So if you’ve hit 50k and your novel is done, great! You nailed it. If you hit the mark but you’ve still got some loose ends to tie up, that’s fine, too. It just means you need to keep writing until those are all finished. Don’t stop, but don’t keep writing just for the sake of writing. You’ve hit your word goal and now your goal is to write a finished work.

Because whether or not your book is done, your work isn’t. You still have December 1 coming, and that means revision time. More about that tomorrow.