The Ultimate Word Count Guide

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” said Pulitzer prize, and Nobel prize, winning author Saul Bellow. This is an understatement from one of the 20th Century’s great writers. Bellow was a man not known for mincing words, or word counts.

Humboldt’s Gift was over 168,000 words. Herzog, perhaps Bellow’s most famous work, was only 100,000 words, but he wrote it as a…