Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Does Size Matter?

I have written four novels at this point. Two of them, I think, are even publishable. My first novel was short, about 68,000 words. It would no doubt have gotten longer had I ever bothered to revise it but it was so awful that the mere thought of working it over gave me a headache. Heck, that thought still does. My next three novels have all been in the 80,000-word range, and that seems like a nice, comfortable length for me. I can tell the sort of story I'm currently writing in that number of words and the books don't feel short; they seem to be just the right length. In order to make them longer I'd have to pad them out or radically change my prose style (which is admittedly pretty dense and tends toward brevity).

My next novel will be, I think, about 90,000 words long. That's not much longer than my current efforts and is still not a long novel. A friend of mine has a book with an agent right now, preparing for submission, and that MS is 150,000 words. Such an undertaking boggles my mind. I don't want to read anything I write of that length, kids. Really I don't. But there are plenty of good long books and as a reader I don't shy away from them. Moby-Dick? Tristram Shandy? Ulysses? Swann's Way? The Iliad? Bring 'em on, I say. But don't ask me to write one.

I've noticed that not only are "door-stop" books of 600 or so pages still selling well, there's also been an increase in the number of short novels and novellas being published lately. I'm pleased, actually, to see the new arrivals table at my local indie bookstore packed not only with monstrous tomes but with slim volumes as well. Freedom sits next to Tinkers, and there are all sorts of books in between.

Which gets me wondering about you fine folks, and my wonderment results in these three questions:

1. Is there a length with which you find you are most comfortable working? If the answer is "it depends," then just tell me what's the length of your current or most-recent MS.

2. Do you shy away from shorter works or from longer works, or do you just not think about a book's length?

3. Do you have any tendency toward reading longer or shorter novels? I know some folks who won't read anything that's under 600 pages ("Less than that's a waste of time," they say), and I know some folks who are intimidated by anything over 200 pages ("More than that's a waste of time," they say). What about you?

29 comments:

  1. I shoot for 60,000 words in the rough draft and after chopping out about 15,000 words and finding the rough spots that need to be expanded my final word counts are around 90,000. That has worked for me in my last 3 novels. My current one is at the very rough stage and 65,000 words and I still have the entire 3rd act to go. I'm thinking it will be close to 90,000 words in the rough draft and it will take a lot of work to get it under 120,000 for the final.
    Since I've written both long 150,000 word novels and short ones I've found the real differences are in the characters. If you like your characters so much that you feel like your cheating on your spouse when you are writing them, then it should be a longer novel. If you are just swept up in the concept of the novel a shorter one is more powerful.
    As far as reading, I love the idea novels. Short novels that can be summed up in one sentence. With longer ones I need to fall in love with the characters or it's a waste of time.

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  2. I tend to fall in the 120,000 word length when it is all said and done. Typically first draft can be as much as 150,000 but editing removes a lot.

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  3. I'm usually around the 106 000 word mark. I know that's pretty specific, but 4 out of my 7 books have been that length (one was around 90 000 words, one is not written, and the other is a short story anthology).

    I don't really consider length when reading a book. Sometimes a story calls for 600 odd pages. Other times, only around 200. That said, the collection on my bookshelf all tend towards the longer novels. I find there is something to the richness of details provided by the longer novels that I just adore.

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  4. In the past, I have tended to write more than 100k. Then I would find myself editing down to below 100k to meet supposed industry standards for a first-time novelist. I've done it every single time. So far, no agent. In my WIP novel, my goal has been 80k. So far, I'm at 70k. We'll see where I end up. As for novels I read, I tend to favor shorter rather than longer, which reinforces my belief that I should aim for writing shorter novels.

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  5. 1) It depends on what I'm writing, I think. My old sci fi and fantasy efforts were in the 120K+ range because of lots of world-building and more sweeping plots. What I write these days is more in the 80-90K range because there's less world-building and the plots are more focused.

    2) I think about length a lot I believe that if I went much longer with this stuff it would be mostly obfuscation and there's plenty of that already. I try to match length to what I'm doing.

    3) I don't really consider it much as a reader, though I sometimes approach longer works daring the author to justify my investment in all those words.

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  6. I am a fan of short books. When I do read something extending more than 250 pages, I often find myself asing "Is that really necessary?" Sometimes it is, sometimes not.

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  7. 1. My novel drafts tend towards 50,000-60,000 words.

    2. I'm a tad irritated, actually, by word counts. When I started out, many decades ago, the average SF/Fantasy novel was around 60,000 words. Sometime in the 80s, the Big Fat Huge Trilogies took over, and there's no frickin' way I could ever write that long. I struggle to get to 60,000. It annoyed me no end. Fortunately, things seem to have gotten more varied again. Still. My most recent ideas have all been for middle-grade books and I wonder how much of that has to do with the shorter length.

    3. I prefer short (she said as she finished up her 900-page copy of Bleak House)....

    -Alex MacKenzie

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  8. 1. I normally end up between 75,000 - 95,000 words. Of course, the genre I'm writing in now - Cozy Mystery - has a 60 - 75K word suggested length. My current MS is at 63,500.

    2. Normally, I just sit down to write and don't worry about length. Most times, my rough drafts come in around 50,000 words. I know in the editing phase I'll flesh out a bunch of things, which normally gets me up to my normal word length. So, basically, I just write and worry later.

    3. No. I love to read, and the length of the book really doesn't matter to me.

    As an end note, one project ended up at 140,000 words. Yikes! I did cut out major chunks over a period of editing phases.

    S

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  9. 1. 50,000 words. I’ve written five novels and four are in that ballpark. The exception was the third which is 90,000 words long and I think of it as epic.

    2. Longer. I’m a great believer in saying what you have to say and getting off the page. I really indulged myself in my last novel and stripped all descriptions down to the very basics. I wrote exactly what I want to read. I think the opening to Waiting for Godot is just perfect: A country road. A tree. Evening. What more do you need to know?

    3. I hate reading long books. And by ‘long’ I mean anything over about 300 pages. I have never read a book over 500 pages. Give me a novella any day of the week.

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  10. I'm going to digress and ask a question to the SF/F writers here about the idea of world-building and length, taking poor Nevets' figure of 120K as a benchmark.

    When I was a kid, SF novels were pretty short. The John Carter, Warlord of Mars books were likely 60K or so each and they seemed to present a pretty full and varied alien world inside a moving plot. Granted, characters were pretty much from central casting. Still, even better SF novels with rich characters and worlds weren't the huge books then that they are now. I haven't read a SF/F book in decades so I have no idea what the landscape's like these days or how styles have changed, but let's just say: if I can write a character-driven novel in 80K words and a SF/F novel is 120K words and that extra length is world-building, doesn't that add up to 40K words of setting and backstory? And if that's the case, is it all really necessary? I make no claims about length in SF/F; I am asking, not accusing. So someone tell me about that.

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  11. my current project is a little over 120,000 words but my previous manuscripts were all much shorter. I never had a target word length, that was just the size the story wanted to be. I may expereiment with target word length for my next manuscript. As for reading it *ehem* depends. Sometimes I want a book that I can start and finish in a day and sometimes I'd rather chew on it slowly for a week or two.

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  12. My stories are almost always short. Despite my best efforts, I end up trimming things down to minimal lengths. I get annoyed when I feel like my work has "filler" and I often can't come up with enough words and thoughts that aren't filler. The more I write, the more I can think about though, so my stories have been getting longer in general. But, I've noticed that when they get longer, they just involve more story lines, so it's almost like I'm simply combining multiple stories together and hoping for some sort of synergism to happen.

    When I read, the length can be a bit intimidating. I'm more willing to start Tinkers as opposed to Freedom. I have to be in a certain state to start a long book, but it happens. I just read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

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  13. Jim Murdoch: Godot isn't a novel, of course, but I get what you're saying. Right now I'm reading A.S. Byatt's Possession for the third or so time and I notice how much detail she gives about the rooms people are in. Pages and pages. I'm not sure if I think it's effective, though God knows Proust could go on endlessly about rooms and their furnishings and I'll sit through that happily. And in Malone Dies, Beckett gives us a pretty full description of Malone's room, and the view out his window into the flat across the way.

    This may be a gender-related thing, though. Are men generally less interested in descriptive prose than women are? My scenes tend to have very little description of setting, though I like to have at least one very physical marker, like a smell or a cracked table leg or whatever. One thing very real to ground the scene in the universe.

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  14. Domey, one thing I'm trying very hard to do is relax with my prose and stretch out, to take more time and linger in scenes and not be so terse. To give the narrative more room to breathe, as it were. I have not had a great deal of success, and most of my time revising is spent cutting, cutting and then cutting. I add clarifying passages and I get ideas for passages that expand the characterizations, so the prose gets more densely packed with ideas as I revise. What I want is to take the same number of ideas and present them in a more relaxed manner. I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that.

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  15. Scott, Cyberlama is told from the first person POV, and the narrator does ramble a bit, so this is expanding my prose, and I think (I hope) it is creating more of that relaxed feeling. I'm noticing, though, that while I like how this works for the main parts of the story, the main scenes, I'm feeling the need to include more transitions because the narrator feels like someone who would do this. So, it's somehow diluting the story. I'm not worrying about this too much at the moment...but I am sort of worrying about it.

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  16. @Scott -- It's very possible for there to be rich world-building in fewer words, but it's a different sort of world-building. Alex mentioned the shift in length for the genre. Part of that is a taste among many fans for extra detail for its own sake.

    When I was a teenager, I loved that stuff. Now, I feel like it's often excess weight and no longer as much to my taste. That's one of the reasons I moved on to other genres, though there is certainly still a place for tight SF/F.

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  17. @Scott – I know that Godot’s not a novel but I just think that description is perfect. Have you ever seen Dogville (again not a novel) where the sets are just chalk lines on the floor? Wonderful! I don’t think you can say that writers who are prone to elaborate descriptions are mainly women but I do think that those who aren’t are more likely to be men.

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  18. Nevets, maybe people want to read epics? Stuff on the Tolkein scale? I know that a big part of the Harry Potter fandom is built around the details of Rowling's world, the little quirky things and the connections between those bits. All that adds to length of the book. I'm not that kind of writer, though. In my last book, I took time to mention the style of a character's hat and I have strong doubts about those extra six words. Which is also not the kind of writer I want to be. So, huh. Conundrum.

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  19. six words for a hat

    I just wanted to say that.

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  20. Jim, I pointed out that Godot is a play for the benefit of readers who didn't know, not for you! I love Dogville. And a week or so ago, Mighty Reader and I went to see a production of The Threepenny Opera that used very minimalist sets and it was fabu.

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  21. I'm changing the name of my personal blog to six words for a hat.

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  22. I do think a lot of people are interested in reading epics these days, but I'm less inclined to read them than I used to be and quite disinclined to write them. At least at the moment...

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  23. I'm a huge fantasy reader. Not all the fantasy I read is epic - i.e., Tad Williams and Robert Jordan. There are a bunch of fantasy novels that I think would come in around the 80,000 to 100,000 word count. Guy Gavriel Kay, in my opinion, does it best as far as keeping world building to a minimum and delivering a great story.

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  24. Size matters to me. :)

    I tend to write on the shorter side of things, but as I've discovered lately, I might be too subtle in my information and might need to be adding more substance, which add more word count. I still think my novels will fall into the short category. Monarch is only 76k. That's pretty short for an adult thriller.

    As a reader, I don't care about length. I do prefer shorter novels if I have a huge stack to read, haha. :)

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  25. I shoot for 80 but I've failed and ended up at 40 three times now. My current WIP, though, will probably be a bit longer. I'm trying. :)

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  26. 1. I have a different goal word count with every project, one which I deem to fit the story as I envision it when setting out, that fits the genre and age range, and that seems reasonable but leaves wiggle room should the story take on a life of its own. My first novel is 61,599 words, or basically a category-length romance. The second topped out on first draft at 94,460. My latest was 82,653 before revisions.

    2. I really don't pay attention to book length when browsing the store shelves. I'm drawn to titles. A catchy or unusual one will draw me to read the back cover copy. The copy is what ultimately determines whether I buy.

    3. No tendency. I read what interests me. Lately those have been shorter books but those are the ones on my TBR pile that struck my fancy at the time. I have books of all sorts of lengths on my shelves.

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  27. When I choose a book to read, page count is of no consideration. I just finished a monster thousand page S.King book and now I'm reading SONG OF THE CROW, which will almost fit in my back pocket, weighing in at 244 pages

    When writing, word count is of no consideration. I just write the story in my head that's clamoring to get out. My first novel was 139,000 words, after editing. My current stands at 108,000, and I'm pretty comfortable with that.

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  28. Yvonne, is that Layne Maheu's Song of the Crow? I love that book. Layne and I get together for drinks every couple of months. We're loud and obnoxious. Well, I am. He's working on a really really great book now.

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  29. I don't like to write OR read overly long books. Well, Harry Potter notwithstanding; I did read those, but I was hooked by the time they got so hugeous. If it's over 400 pages, I groan and think again. When I'm writing, I wouldn't EVER go over 100K because I've heard agents don't generally like them that big (at least for YA; adult books could be diff).

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