I have great news!
A while ago a read an article that compared the vocabularies of various hip-hop artists against the vocabulary of Shakespeare and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The researcher used the first 35,000 words of each artist's repetoire so that artists with a larger portfolio could be compared with artists with a much newer, or less prolific career. Curious, I took my novel's first 35,000 words and had an app count the number of unique words.
6,138. Based on the article's criteria, that's more than Shakespeare and Moby Dick.
(On a side note, out of the ~84,000 words of my novel, I have about 10,000 unique words.)
Granted, some of the dialogue in my novel is written in Spanish and romanized Korean, and this article probably has some faults in it's sampling and criteria that I am completely unaware of, but it doesn't hurt to do little things that stroke one's flagging ego. :-)
This is also very encouraging because my first chapter (2,300 words) included A LOT of repetition and was meant to read very similiar to a children's fairy tale (simple language, simple words). If we were to assume that if the first 35,000 words of your work contains around 6,000 unique words, then you have a vocabulary greater to or near Shakespeare and Melville. That means that you need 17% of your work to be composed of unique words, and 26% of just my first chapter has words that appear only once. Woo Hoo!
The trouble, of course, is not only the amount of words you know, but also how you use them. By this article's criteria, Herman Melville had a greater vocabulary than Shakespeare, yet we all know that England's Bard had a HUGE vocabulary, and his artistry, subtlety, and depth of expression is still the standard that so many writers try to achieve, yet still fall short of (even disregarding popularity and grading Shakespeare and the successors that followed him skill versus skill).
A thing I've noticed in great storytelling is that great writers will have their characters or narrators make observations about life and human nature. I remember the first time I read Anna Karenina, I had to set the book down and reevaluate my entire life for an hour. For the next month, I placed every thought within context of that idea written in the first paragraph of that novel:
"Every happy family is the same. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Whoa.
Obviously, these fifteen words could've been taken out of an elementary schooler's vocab book, yet they hit something so intrinsic to life (and my life) that I had to step back and think about it. No wonder Tolstoy is considered to be one of literature's foremost artists.
Andrew Staton (writer of "WALL-E", "Finding Nemo", and other movies) makes the same observation in a TED talk he did some years ago (https://youtu.be/KxDwieKpawg). He said that every great story needs to make some sort of commentary on the human condition; that it should teach you something after it's telling. Doing the fifth edit on my novel and reading some short stories by David Means and Caitly Horrocks, I realize that I have very little in my novel that talks about the entirety of the human condition. Sure I do a bit of alliteration, allusion, antithesis, symbolism, meta-construction, and I sprinkle a dash of irony in my novel, but when do I say something REALLY important?
I don't. So I need to practice more.
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