SIX PLOT IDEAS. WHICH SHALL I CHOOSE?

HELP! I NEED TO MAKE A CHOICE!

Many of you know I’ve already written and published 13 books for adults and children.

I’d love to write another 13 but I’m well aware that time is against me. I hope I’ll have time to write at least one more, but the difficulty right now is that I need to choose between six plot ideas (for all of which I’ve already written a few chapters). My books for children are the most popular but I love writing for adults too.

These are the six. Help me choose!

A) THE OTHER BOY (for 10 years up). Identical twin boys separated at birth, unaware of each other’s existence until 12 years later one sees a newspaper photo of the other and sets out to find him. (This is my latest idea and I’m slightly leaning towards it).

B) THE TRAVELLING SWEETSHOP (9 years up). A magical sweetshop, advertising all you can eat for 50p, suddenly appears on the route to school. My worry about this one is that it might suggest the sweetshop owner is selling drugs!

C) HIGH SCHOOL ROBOT (13 years up). Another story based in Swindon but 30 years in the future. A perfected robot, indistinguishable from a human teenager, is the forerunner for a spy operation.

D) THE SECRET OF COTTINGHAM HALL (Adults). A romance with a tragic secret.

E) BODY SHOP (Adults). A rape/murder victim finds herself at the North West Clearing Station, run jointly by representatives of Heaven and Hell who compete for dead souls. The dead are allowed to rent a body and return to Earth for two weeks, to seek revenge or forgiveness but must give up their souls to Satan when they return.

F) A SNAPSHOT IN TIME (13 years up). A teenage girl and a boy are separated by a century but linked by a photograph.

HELP!!!

HOW LONG IS A NOVEL? HOW SHORT IS A NOVELLA?

A novel typically has around 95,000 words, although the range can cover anything from about 65,000 to say 350,000 or even longer. Children's novels for those who can read on their own may be shorter, say 35,000 to 40,000 words.

My own adult novels, those published on Kindle, are around 70,000 words, but if I were looking for a traditional publisher I would aim for at least 95,000 words to make the printing and distribution costs worthwhile.

A novella  is a short novel, say 20,000 to 40,000 words. It's difficult to get published traditionally in print, as the cost of printing outweighs its popularity and the price it can fetch in the bookstores, but it's now quite a popular format for e-books, eg Kindle.

The same rules apply for both novels and novellas.

Generally they must have a beginning, a middle and an ending. There should be a theme (which can usually be described in one word, eg loss, loneliness, courage, power, survival, ambition, greed, hatred, love, escape, justice, childlessness, disability) and a plot, which relates how this is overcome and reveals what happens first, what happens next and what happens at the end.

Writing a full length novel can be pretty hard graft, and it can be tempting to try and reduce your story to novella length. But generally a novel has far more 'meat' and gives you space to introduce more characters - oddball, funny or malevolent, but (of course!) always relevant to the overall theme and plot.