How many words is a good short story?
How Long Should a Short Story Be? The average short story should run anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 words, but they can be anything above 1,000 words.
A work of fiction between 20,000 and 49,999 words is considered a novella. Once a book hits the 50,000 word mark, it is generally considered a novel. (However, a standard novel is around 80,000 words, so books between 50,000 to 79,999 words may be called short novels.)
A short story length is typically around 5,000 words in length but maybe as long as 7000 words. Stories that range from 500 to 1,00 words are classed as flash fiction (here's a great example). Stories less than 500 words are considered to be micro-fiction.
Based on this dataset of novels, we can establish some guidelines for chapter length: the average word count of a chapter generally ranges between 1,500 words to 5,000 words, with 3,000-4,000 words being the most common sweet spot.
However, the word “short” can mean different things, but generally speaking, a short story can be anywhere from 1,000–15,000 words, but most publications only publish short stories between 3000–5,000 words. Anything less than 1000 words is categorized either as a flash fiction or a micro-fiction.
Very Short Story: 1,000 – 5,000 words – $0.00 – $0.99. Short Story: 5,000 – 10,000 words – $0.99 – $1.99. Novelette: 10,000 – 20,000 words – $1.99 – $3.99. Novella: 20,000 – 40,000 words – $2.99 – $5.99.
Writing 4,000 words will take about 1.7 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 3.3 hours for handwriting. However, if the content needs to include in-depth research, links, citations, or graphics such as for a blog article or high school essay, the length can grow to 13.3 hours.
| Word Count | Slow (125 wpm) | Average (300 wpm) |
|---|---|---|
| 4,000 words | 32 minutes | 13.3 minutes |
| 5,000 words | 40 minutes | 16.7 minutes |
| 7,500 words | 60 minutes | 25.0 minutes |
| 10,000 words | 1.3 hours | 33.3 minutes |
Build to the climax efficiently
In short stories—emphasis on short—your plot needs to build efficiently. Every paragraph, every sentence, every word should take the reader closer to the climax. If a piece doesn't serve this purpose, cut it. Short stories just do not have space for meandering.
Short story length is always between 1,000 and 10,000 words, and usually 1,500-7,500 words. How long should a short story be in pages? A short story is 3-30 pages long. This number of pages works best when published in a literary magazine or similar publication.
How many pages is a 4000 word story?
Answer: 4000 words is 8 pages single spaced or 16 pages double spaced.
1) Learn your time limit and calculate your word count.
The average person speaks at somewhere between 125 and 150 words per minute. It's always better to speak more slowly than quickly. Thus, if you're speaking for 20 minutes, you want a total word count of about 2,500 words.
In any of these books, some chapters are longer than others. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has an average of 4,560 words per chapter. Twilight uses about 4,580 words per chapter.
If you'd like some guidelines, you can assume that the average nonfiction book is about 50k words and that most nonfiction books have about 12 chapters. So around 4,000 words would be an “average” chapter length.
There are no rules when it comes to chapter length. The important thing is to concentrate on making your chapters fit your story, not on making your story fit your chapters. Many novelists these days prefer chapters that are between 1,500 words—or six book pages— and 8,000 words, or 32 book pages.
Answer: At the normal speaking rate of 130 words per minute (wpm), a 30 minutes long speech will have about 3,900 words .
A short story is a work of prose fiction that can be read in one sitting—usually between 20 minutes to an hour. There is no maximum length, but the average short story is 1,000 to 7,500 words, with some outliers reaching 10,000 or 15,000 words.
It looks like most people take less than 4 weeks to write a short story. For a lot of people it takes less than 1 week. That makes perfect sense since a short story is normally less than 6,000 words, so it really only takes 1 burst of momentum to get a first draft done!
Getting your short story published is often more difficult than actually writing the story. Even with thousands of literary magazines accepting short stories for publication, you still have less than a 10% chance of getting your story published any time you submit.
Can you make money selling short stories? Yes, it's definitely possible to make money selling short stories. There are hundreds of websites and magazines that pay for short stories. You might not get rich selling your short stories, but this can be a great source of side income.
Do short stories still get published?
There's a wide variety of short story markets out there, including ezines, literary magazines and literary journals (yes those still exist), and anthologies out there that take submissions. The “professional” level of these publications varies widely, as does the pay rate. Don't expect to get rich off of short stories.
Easily. 4000 words isn't much at all; the time-consuming part is the research phase. Once you know what you want to write, you can type that length out in a few hours.
- The first thing I do is, I reread what I wrote the day before. ...
- I start writing and don't stop unless I produce 2,000 words. ...
- Immediately after I'm done writing, I start reading. ...
- Every night, close to bedtime, I read aloud what I wrote earlier in the day.
If you came here for the number alone, the answer I come to a bit later is about one peer-reviewed reference for every 200 words of essay body, based on the body being 75% of the word count.
There is no defined number of paragraphs in a short story, as it's up to the writer to decide how to structure their manuscript. Generally speaking, if you're expecting to write ~5,000 words, you could be looking at 25 paragraphs if they are 200 words long.