Any Good Method for Calculating Word Count Based on An Outline?

Question

I've written short stories before (around 6,000 words), and I know what I have outlined is longer than a short story. But, I cannot decide if it is "novella length" or if it will break into "novel length". (I'm calling it "novel length" if it is more than 40,000 words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count)

It will certainly be the longest thing I've ever written, but I am not sufficiently experienced in longer works like this to know exactly how long it will be. Is there any good way to estimate how many words an outline will translate into when it is actually written? [edited: typo]

Answer 1

Outlines vary in how much text they cover; some people might write a multi-page outline for the same content for which another would write:

Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy goes to mad-scientist school and builds a new girl.

So the only way to know how your outlines map to word count is to take samples. Compare your previous outlines to word counts of the resulting stories and see if there's a pattern.

If you don't have previous outlines, you're going to need to experiment. Try outlining one section (say, a few chapters -- whatever forms a logical sub-story for you), writing the story, and then using that to approximate the rest based on a full outline.