Tell your story in how many words it takes.

Because you're a new writer I would just go for it. Write your story as much as you can and don't worry so much about the word count. You can always add more or take out stuff when you're finished.

But the most important thing is to have fun! Just write and see where your story takes you.

Write whatever you want to write, there are no rules!

You'd be surprised how easy it is to get to 50k though - it's not as long as it sounds if you really get into the flow of a story.

Let the story tell you how many words it should be. You can write stories that coherently complete in 300 words or 300,000

Just… don’t write a book. Write the story you’re trying to tell and ignore word count. Yes a novel is 80+ thousand words, but you don’t need to care about that because no single project first draft you write is going to become a published novel in one go even if it hit that word count.

You can practice writing for word counts later (although here I’ll note that essay writing is what helped me be able to write to word count, and learning singularly off novel-ish writing seems like a bad idea to me).

Enough to tell the story. 

There's some really good advice here.

Tell a coherent tight story. If it ends up 200,000 words, then great. If it ends up 1000 words, that's great too.

No word should be unneeded.

You're not being graded on word count, write however much or little you feel best tells your story.

Just write it. Once you get to the editing stage you can either cut it down or beef it up.

Just write until you reach a point that feels like the end or a natural stopping point. It's possible you will pass what you expect to and possibly even end up with a series instead of a single book.

Worrying about word count is a very common mistake first time writers make because in reality word count means nothing. If you use smaller words you can end up with a higher word count despite the same amount of actual content whereas using words that encompass more things can net you a smaller word count. I've also never known a reader to look at, know or care even a little bit about how many words are in a book.

No idea. My act 1 i just finished is like 12,000 words but it has placeholder notes because why not. "Insert interrogation of MC here. Info to be asked - based camp, friends, leaders. Torture? Not sure yet." So I have big chunks missing but the bones are there which i can fix later. So thats cool. Doing it like this really killed my writers block.

Opa! A resposta curta é: não se prenda a números agora.

Eu acabei de finalizar a escrita do meu primeiro livro e o maior conselho que posso te dar é: apenas divirta-se e absorva o processo.

Se você entrar nessa bitola de "tenho que bater 80 mil palavras" logo de cara, a escrita deixa de ser uma descoberta e vira uma tarefa burocrática. Você corre o risco de começar a "encher linguiça" só para bater meta, e isso mata a criatividade.

Se o seu livro terminar com 20 mil palavras, parabéns, você escreveu uma novela. Se der 10 mil, é um conto longo. O importante desse primeiro projeto é você descobrir se gosta da rotina de sentar e escrever. Deixa as regras de mercado para quando você decidir publicar.

Boas festas e boa escrita!

I read 90,000 to 120,000 for traditional is the normal range.