Short story: over 1,000 words, usually less than 10,000. Novelette: 7,500 to 19,000 words. Novella: 10,000 to 40,000 words.
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. Flash fiction is a short story that is 500 words or less.
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.
Answer: 10000 words is 20 pages single spaced or 40 pages double spaced.
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.
For most publishers, a book is “novel-length” when it's between 50,000 and 110,000 words. At a writers conference I recently attended, publishing veteran Jane Friedman said 80,000 words is good for most fiction, below 60,000 isn't novel length territory, and above 120,000 is likely too much.
A short story is a work of fiction with fewer than 10,000 words. This word-count ceiling is somewhat fuzzy, however, with many major writing prizes and magazines requesting submissions of no more than 7,500 words.
Writing 10,000 words will take about 4.2 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 8.3 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 33.3 hours.
The entire Harry Potter series – 1,084,170 words.
But you can, and likely should, still write your short story in a single sitting. Of course, it depends how long your short story is, how long you can remain sitting, and whether the passion with which your short narrative whips you up can carry you from beginning to end at hurtling locomotive speed.
While there are many different short story styles, here we will consider three popular short story types: lyrical, flash fiction, and vignette.
The first draft of a short story can be written in one or two days. However, you should set it aside for a few days and then revise it. A story might see several revisions until it is finished. Therefore, although you might spend three or four days on a short story, they won't be consecutive.
10,000 words is the equivalent of 20 single-spaced A4 pages, or 40 double-spaced A4 pages. It might sound like a lot, but you can easily reach this word count with the help of a standard word processing program.
The average person speaks 120 to 160 words a minute, which means the average five-minute presentation is 600 to 800 words.
Some argue that anything over 40,000 words can be considered a novel. The general consensus, however, is that a novel should be at least 50,000 words long, is approximately 200 pages. This means that 200 pages is a sufficient length for a novel.
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.
Here's what I discovered. Out of 97% of people who begin writing a novel: 30 out of 1000 go on to finish it. Only 6 out of those 30 go on to see their novel published.
It's absolutely possible to write a novel in a day using dictation.
Most short stories do not get published as stand-alone books unless they are part of a collection. Instead, they get published in literary magazines, which have strict limits on the length stories can run.
Whether writing your book or revising it, this will be the most helpful book you'll ever buy. That's the sweet spot, folks. If you don't know how long to make your short story, shoot for around 5,000 words.
Short stories, which are usually between 1,000 and 7,500 words long and very rarely have chapters. They do, however, sometimes include scene transitions and breaks to denote a change in setting or scene, or the passage of time.
But if a chapter is more than 10,000 words, you should probably break it into two or more chapters. Remember, books are structured in parts, chapters, and sections. A part is simply a set of chapters that go together and fall under a larger idea.