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The perfect length
More talk about novels today, but don't worry, it's calm and collected. I've just been doing some thinking about lengths.
Today I have to go get three photocopies of the MS made and bound. I printed it again last night, after I realized I had messed up the copy I printed the night before - not enough of a gutter for binding. This is a little arduous since my printer's magazine can only hold about fifty pages and the MS prints to nearly two hundred.
However, don't use page count as a measuring stick. The novel is short. Everyone who's read it so far thinks it's short. I thought it was short when I wrote it ... and I wasn't pleased about it.
The Novel on the Floor, my first novel, was rewritten almost from scratch three times. Its latest and semi-final incarnation is 128,000 words long. Now, I happen to believe that's a very comfortable length for a book, but the consensus was that it was too long. I panicked. Adding is easy; cutting is hard. In general, if I thought something was excess, I either didn't write it or I cut it myself before showing people the MS. What was I going to cut? There was no fat left.
Nonelvis found what she thought was fat. At the time I screamed that she was killing some of the better material. Well, the advantage of stepping away from a MS for over a year is that it gives you a fresh perspective. Now I look at some of this stuff and I realize she's right. It's fat. I'll probably end up with 100,000 words, if I ever get around to making her edits.
The point is, I was so scandalized by that experience that I was determined not to write the next one overlength. So I set myself a goal of 70,000 words and I made the book fit that Procrustean bed, hitting plot points on cue to length. I am happy with the way it turned out ... except at the end. It needs more at the end, and I knew it at the time.
Fortunately, now I feel like I have the liberty to add the material that I wanted to add in the first place, and everybody will be happy.
All of this confusion arises because there is no standard for lengths. I have been through every writer's guide I can lay hands on, and if you can find one that quotes digits at you - says something like "Ideally, a novel is between ___ and ___ words long," then for pity's sake tell me where you found it.
In fact I believe most writer's guides are being deliberately coy about ideal lengths, and I can't blame them. It's personal taste. Ysabel favors really long books; so does Mary Anne. Nonelvis seems to like them too. Both Nonelvis and Mary Anne have read and loved books I shudder to countenance starting, such as Cryptonomicon, Mason and Dixon, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and that damned Vikram Seth book that's apparently the longest novel published in English. I want to say A Perfect Boy but I'm not sure that's right.
It may depend on the editors too. Perhaps one editor doesn't like looking at long books because she doesn't like reading them. Editors are human; you have to account for their tastes just as much as anyone else. That doesn't seem like an entirely fair system - ideally the editors would be robots who only evaluate books on whether they're good or not - but then, what's "good" mean?
In other fields you do sometimes have ideals. I believe that the perfect pop song is three minutes long, or very close to it, and so do a lot of recording artists (Nick Lowe even made a joke about it - over in the sidebar - which is funnier when you know that "I Love My Label" runs exactly 3:00).
But even my own "perfect length" for a book changes. I can't read long novels now because I have too many projects and my brain is full. If it's something I can't finish in a single day - i.e. a couple of hours of off-again, on-again reading - I'll never remember what all the characters were doing when I come back to it. Fortunately I can read a fairly long book in a very short time - but not Cryptonomicon. The only reason I haven't given up on An Instance of the Fingerpost is that I intend to read it on a five-hour train trip to NYC a couple of weeks from now.
And the reason I've been reading so many folktales lately is that they're an interest of mine which also happens to be suited to the read-where-you-can method: A bunch of short segments, each of which stands on its own.
How does 100,000 words sound to you? I think I'll make that my new golden mean. After all, I can only go so long before I start the next novel. The ideas are waiting.
© Columbine
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They always want the perfect song,
and always just 2:50 long,
So I write them one.
- Nick Lowe
"I Love My Label"
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