novel - Is there a method to estimating the length of a work before writing it?

I am writing my first novel, which I think likely will end up being several volumes. Although I have a lot of experience in poetry and short stories, this is a very different challenge!

My question is about estimating the length of a work prior to writing.

It is an epic scale story that I have planned out in great detail (while of course remaining flexible). I have outlined it and started to write pieces of it, but still am easily less than 1% into actual writing. In this process I realized that I need to decide if I am going to try to do this in one volume or multiple.

This will help me decide how to structure the overarching storyline, as well as:

1. When to bring the story arcs together


2. Whether I need to shape a wrap-up/cliffhanger for each volume


3. What level of detail to give to elements of the story. If I were to keep it to a single volume, I feel I would have to condense things and be too superficial. On the other hand, if I go into the level of detail that I enjoy (and have used in short stories), it could easily spread into a series of several books.

I attempted comparing it to other works such as LOTR, which I think is only slightly larger in scale, but my limited experience writing long pieces makes it difficult to conceptualize the relative weight of different events in my story.

I looked for advice on this, and I found reading this thread helpful. However, estimating length isn't much addressed. Is there a method for this?

Answer

The main problem with trying to estimate something like this is that, even if two writers used the same very detailed plot summary to write a novel, they might produce works that aren't close to being the same length, because of the way they write.

Some authors are much more "concise" than others; for example, Voltaire's Candide has been described as a 1,000-page epic condensed into 75 pages, while Tolkien's work often rambled with details that weren't even relevant to the full plot (e.g. Bombadil). Admittedly that last example may not sound like it makes much difference, but there's a more relevant observation re: LOTR. If you work out how many words motivated each hour of film adaptation, they were condensed even more than most novels. (Much could be cut, e.g. in the first film characters step into a tunnel and are seen emerging from it a few seconds later, and quite a bit happens therein in the novel!)

Even the structure of a novel can influence how concise it is; for example, if the same events are told from multiple perspectives the word count will probably climb (see e.g. George R R Martin), whereas if characters are writing to each other with descriptions of what happened to them (see e.g. The Color Purple) the word count can fall.

The only thing I can recommend is bullet-pointing the plot in detail, with nested bullets so you can be confident of the relative weight of different chapters. If you then write one of them, you'll have a rough basis for extrapolation. But even chapter by chapter a novel can vary in how quickly it tells its story, so this will only be a rough estimate.