Word Counts of Short Format Novels

When winding down on "Freeway 1979", I came to a conundrum that intrigued me, 'Fifty thousand words does not a novel make'.  Freeway is an action novel and the tenor of it is crisp and sharp.  I abhor extraneous back story for some of the characters, instead opting that their terse words and actions speak to their past.  The last mile, about four thousand words, had me sloughing through that very exercise.  I felt like I was writing a college assignment that I cared little for.

First Edition Cover

Out of the 50k+ words for Freeway, I think the perfect word count would come down to 32k and no more than 35k.  After that, it will certainly plod.  In response, I thought over many shorter form novels I've read and wondered at their word count.  My admiration for them is that they put forward a bold story and in a format that frames its immediacy.

In the process of this discovery, I found this site: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/.  It's promise is that it will analyze your story and find ways to whittle down what it considers too much.

Novels that came immediately to mind were:

Old Man and the Sea - Earnest Hemingway 6,162
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 47,094
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane 47,180

The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Earnest Hemingway 9,162

Of them, Gatsby is just a powerhouse.  All of them are memorable.  Others came up like, 

Old Yeller - Fred Gipson 35,968 and Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis 36,363.  Taunt prose and an efficiency of words.

First Edition Cover

All told, I have 18k words of inefficiency.  Nothing beyond what should be considered notes.  It'll be integral on the second pass, I'm sure, but it was painful.

For grins, I checked in on my favorite novel of all time to see its word count: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 110,668.

Sometimes it takes as many words as you need to tell that story.