If you’re spending time on one of the exploding number of social networks being launched and/or acquired by assorted billionaires, you’ve probably seen a publishing type expressing a desire for shorter novels or even–gasp–novellas.
As Kate Dwyer recently pointed out in Esquire (and Lincoln Michel expanded on), for a long time short novels and novellas were essentially verboten in the publishing industry. Sometimes a novella would sneak through when it was included in a short story collection, some brand name authors like Ian McEwan got to break the mold, but for the most part, publishers tended to want novels that fell within a pretty narrow word count band.
After the explosion of This Is How You Lose the Time War and the rise of new imprints focused on shorter fiction, publishers are reassessing the conventional wisdom that prevailed for the last several decades. When you combine this with inflation and an increase in materials and shipping costs, plus reader attention spans and price consciousness, there is absolute downward pressure on word counts.
But setting aside the obvious successes, I have a nagging question: Do readers really want their novels to be shorter?
Blockbusters tend to be long
When I think back over the course of my twenty years in publishing, I can’t think of many short blockbuster books. On the contrary, the blockbusters have tended to be quite long for their genre.
Harry Potter, Twilight, A Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Da Vinci Code, Gone Girl, The Hate U Give, The Golden Compass… all fell well outside of the traditional word count band for their genre.
Even The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which seemed very slim for a bestseller at the time, was over 60,000 words. Where the Crawdads Sing is in the “normal” range of approximately 100,000 words. Sally Rooney’s novels range from 70,000-100,000 words.
Maybe you can help me think of others, but the last runaway successful novel I can think of that was in the very short zone was long before my time: Jonathan Livingston Seagull in 1970.
Now, of course this can reflect prior self-fulfilling prophecies. Publishers of yore believed readers wanted door-stopper summer reads, so they promoted those books, and that helped them catch on with readers. Maybe there were novellas in the past that were shelved entirely or just didn’t receive the right push.
But I think there’s a reason the biggest franchises tend to be epic. They are extremely immersive, and it takes time and description to build those worlds. The canvases are large and we lose ourselves in them.
Novellas can absolutely do this and achieve a huge bang for the buck, but it’s not quite the same thing. The aperture tends to be narrower.
The wrong lessons for writers
A big worry I have is that writers seeing a vogue for shorter word counts might internalize the wrong lessons about what to cut and keep.
Over the past five years I’ve seen an ever-increasing tendency toward screenplay-izing novels, with rampant over-reliance on dialogue, and particularly idle banter that might be appealing onscreen if John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are doing the talking, but doesn’t really work well in a novel.
When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!
I’m currently (finally) reading Wolf Hall, and while it’s a very long novel and just as incredible as everyone says it is, I truly wish it were even longer. Hilary Mantel had such a gift for making historical figures leap off the page, but I wish there were even more physical description to help immerse me in this period of history. My kingdom for some sconces with dripping candles! (Only sort of kidding).
If you’re going to cut something, take a cold, hard look at meandering conversations and banter for the sake of banter, redundancies in the prose, static introductions to characters, and scenes that could be combined.
Now, don’t take this advice overly literally. Sometimes characters just need to have an idle conversation or stare at the sunflowers. Not every story arc needs to follow a traditional western approach to storytelling.
But if you’re going to try to shorten your novel, take a more expansive view of what could be cut rather than just tossing out the narrative voice and physical description.
Choice is great, but let books be what they’re meant to be
Don’t get me wrong. I love that publishers are reevaluating their conventional wisdom around novellas and short novels. Experimentation is important! I like novellas too!
It’s a shame that stories have been artificially stretched in the past–or lost entirely–simply due to arcane beliefs about the “right” length of novels for their (similarly arbitrarily-defined) genres.
My concern is that the publishing industry might overcorrect here and there will be editorial pressure to slim down books that are already the correct length. Absolutely let’s trim the non-additive fat and meandering conversations, but let’s not edit books into an inferior place based on super arbitrary ideas about what readers want right now.
I personally think readers want choice more than they want every single book they read to be much shorter. It’s great that the industry’s outdated word count restrictions may loosen. But that’s only going to be ideal if publishers let stories be the length they’re meant to be.
What say you?
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Art: Still Life With Bible by Vincent van Gogh
Bill Swan says
A basic rule from an old-fashioned newspaper editor (now writing fiction): A story should be the length of a shoelace.
Long enough to do the job properly, but not so long you trip over it and fall flat on your face.
Neil Larkins says
Love it!
Neil Larkins says
So I guess to sum up….
How long is a book?
As long as it takes.
Christine DeSmet says
Bill,
I love that answer! I’m a writing coach and author and I agree with Nathan about all this length stuff. I also write in the “cozy mystery ” area of traditional mysteries. It seems everybody is writing them now, and many are quite short and Nathan is correct about some of them being not much more than a screenplay with dialogue all the way through. And some of those dialogue-driven thin books just don’t work because they are unfulfilling to read. We’re definitely in the middle of a lot of changes for novels, and yes, I believe many are short because of the cost of paper and production and mailing, too, for those readers who still love paper (me included). For a hefty great book, it doesn’t get better than Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Pulitzer winner, DEMON COPPERHEAD. A big fat book where every word counts.
Donna says
Having just finished a novel with relentless action and uninteresting, paper-thin characters, I wished for the book to be much shorter. But it still wouldn’t have been better.
Length doesn’t matter; richness does.
Jaq says
We had a conversation about this in one of my Fantasy writers groups. The upshot of it was that younger readers (of Fantasy at least) often prefer long books while old codgers like myself prefer shorter.
Back in the days when trad publishing was the only choice, it was easier to sell a 70-80k word manuscript and those that exceeded 100k were often told to split it up into a series. Obviously because of printing costs.
The thing is, I’ve never read a long book that didn’t meander at times and lost my attention, and that included Stephen King. Too often I can’t help but think some of the longer Fantasy books I read would benefit from a good professional content edit.
What I find does work very well, for those of us who get attached to Fantasy worlds, is related books. Usually a main trilogy and several related novellas, or like Anne McCaffrey did with her early Pern books, a second trilogy in the same world!
This can make a fictional world infinite in its possibilities.
Ari says
I recently read a book that was extremely long and was mostly dialogue, it was so hard to feel immersed in the story because there was very little visual created to pull me in and the length just seemed to create a lot of “filler.”
Raymond Walker says
Personally, I like books that are exceptionally long, I just re-read “The Wheel of Time” series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (14 books each around a thousand pages). But I have noticed that many of my shorter novels are selling better than they once did whilst the longer ones are selling at a continuous rate.
Oh, and good short books.
Call of the Wild,
Piranesi, (Sussanah Clarke)
Animal Farm,
The Social Contract,
Behold the Man (Michael Moorcock).
Rama. (Arthur C Clarke.)
The Iliad,
The Letters of Malachai Malagrowther,
I am sure that there are many more, but these jumped to mind.
Only included the authors name where you may not know them.