Hemming in the Tension
When I tweeted up the author Anne R. Allen for writing that “Word count guidelines have been trending down in the last decade,” I found our colleague Hugh Howey checking in from a galaxy far, far away to say, “Slaughterhouse Five, Frankenstein, and Fahrenheit 451 are three of my favorite sci-fi works of all-time, and each is around 50K. The problem part of most novels is the boring middle bit. Best to just leave that part out.”
The desired price of the hardback began to determine the length of the manuscript, which is a weird way to do art. Personally, I'd read more fantasy novels if they came in smaller size but more often. Waiting 7 years for a 1,500 page tome is no bueno.
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) March 21, 2018
He’s right, of course, as is Anne Allen, and we went on to discuss (briefly!) the problem some big-name authors run into in this regard, too. I call it the Clancy effect. Once they’re established as a publishing house’s majors, the editorial touch gets lighter, often more pixie dust than anything else. Typos are caught, we have to hope, but developmental work (“structural” edits to your British neighbors) goes out the window.
That can go to anybody’s head, and many of us can name an icon whose work got leggier and sadly shapeless as the big career flabbed on.
I've seen this personally when I edit anthologies. The bigger the name, the more umbrage the author takes with any suggestion. I think writing can get worse over a career because of the unwillingness to be edited (and laziness from the publisher).
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) March 21, 2018
Too Much Entertainment
At London Book Fair last week, another element of this issue came into sharper focus as I moderated a panel for the Byte the Book organization, which looks at the industry from the digital vantage point.
While the session was titled “Publishers Go Prospecting: Finding Hidden Treasure in Your Content,” I’d worked out with our four fine panelists (from the BBC, Penguin Random House, Vodafone, and Hodder Education) an approach that would take us past the obvious issues of spelunking for good backlist titles. (Bring Up the Bodies, as Hilary Mantel might say.)
We looked at today’s mushrooming level of competition for reading time from really fine television and film. After all, you may have felt the first really deep tremor of storytelling’s new cinematic leadership in February when Amazon Publishing created its Topple Books imprint in direct collaboration with Amazon Studios and the activist-filmmaker Jill Soloway (Transparent, I Love Dick, Six Feet Under).
As the futurist and corporate strategist Tom Goodwin told me, “Book publishing is not in the ‘text industry.’ It’s not in the ‘reading industry.’ It’s in the ‘what do people want to spend their time doing? industry.’”
And that’s where the rubber is going to increasingly meet the shortest road possible.
Listen to Howey and Allen, watch your family’s time-management patterns, notice how Netflix knows you won’t hang out for the next episode if they roll full credits, so within seconds they’re cranking the next installment into view.
Is there an exception? Subscribers to Audible who get one credit monthly for an audiobook are known to favor the longest listens because they feel they’ll get more for their money that way. How much would you like to bet they make it through 20+ hours of Ayn Rand? And even then, downloading Atlas Shrugged is an economic decision, just in terms of financial rather than time economy.
One of the things for which we admire such writers as Joan Didion is their remarkable economy.
Hell, it’s great in conversation, too. Nicolas Roche, the new chief of the Bureau international de l’édition française in Paris, perfectly answered in one line my question of how foreign rights sales of French books are going these days: “It’s harder to sell a book to the English than it is to sell a car to the Japanese.”
Boom, huh?
My most recent lean discovery is Go by Kazuki Kaneshiro in its muscular translation by Takami Nieda for Amazon Publishing’s AmazonCrossing translation imprint. Only 161 pages in print. And that reminds me to tell you about the excellent World Book Day offer of nine free terrific translations available through Tuesday Pacific Time (April 24) from AmazonCrossing, do take advantage of it, More than 1.7 million pages of these nine books have been read at this writing during the limited-time offer.
And my provocation for you today is this: wrack your brain (quickly, efficiently) and tell me the most impressive relatively shorter read you can recall.
As I write this, I’m en route to Athens for the opening of UNESCO’s World Book Capital on Monday, World Book Day, and I’ve checked: The Iliad runs to about 155,700 words in some English translations, The Odyssey 123,500 or so. I think Cliff’s Notes first appeared in Thessaloniki about eight months after Homer started selling.
I can imagine the poet telling his editor the same thing we journalists say to ours: “But I didn’t have time to write short.”
Your turn: Tell us your favorite short work. And how conscious are you of your reader’s time and obligations and other media temptations as you write? Are you feeling yet the server-hot breath of electronic entertainment on your neck?
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About Porter Anderson
@Porter_Anderson is the 2019 recipient of London Book Fair's International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Anderson previously was The Bookseller's Associate Editor for The FutureBook in London. Priors: CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and other media including Thought Catalog's #MusicForWriters series. More:PorterAndersonMedia.com | Google+
Clancy’s first book “Hunt for Red October” was rejected by every major publishing house he sent it to. Finally, an association, the US Naval Insitute, took it on. It was their first novel and a gamble. They gave a copy to Ronald Reagan and it was on his desk in a widely pubslished photo. The rest is history.
Actually, the rest of what I know is gossip, so I’ll leave that out.
Hey, Jill.
Very cool background on Clancy’s “Hunt for Red October,” thanks for that — and the left-out gossip, lol. I interviewed Clancy in his Baltimore apartment a few years before his death, really interesting fellow and great conversationalist.
Great of you to read me and comment, cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Well and succinctly done, sir.
Thanks!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I just finished The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. What a gorgeous little book. It has all the elements of wonder. But a book I return to over and over is The Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris.
Children’s books tend to be very tightly written still. And as a writer of children’s books I keep my ideal readers in mind, which is not just the child but the parent too. I cut my teeth writing for magazines and it trained me to cut out anything that didn’t serve the story.
Vijaya,
“The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” is on my list of amazing small books, also. First read it about five or six years ago, and it has become one of those books I return to…I’ve read it at least more three times. I feel so peaceful reading it.
Grand recommendation, CK, thanks, I need to read this Snail, obviously!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
A kindred spirit!
And “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” is one gorgeous little title, too, Vijaya!
Thanks for the great recommendation and for reading and commenting, as always. There’s a parallel to the tightness of children’s books’ writing in comics and graphic novels in which authors are frequently working very closely with illustrators. Obviously a great collaboration in many ways.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
You’ll crave your own little snail after this :)
Yes, Vijaya, children’s books are tightly written and middle grade and YA word counts have stayed about the same. But several years ago, picture book word counts were under 1,000 words, then dropped to 800, then 500, now even 250.
Oh yes, my little novelty book is less than a 100 words! But I do lament the loss of the longer story books. They’re still being published by a few houses.
Boy, Mary, a 250-word book, even for kids, is really, really short, LOL Granted, picture books for very young kids are a world unto themselves. (Only so much you want to develop your characters in a board book!) But wow, that IS short.
Thanks for the comment.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Flowers for Algernon, The Martian Chronicles…we could go on all day.
Howley’s point about hardbacks (and their price, I’d add) is right on. For $25 you want a big reading experience. Length is part of that value equation but so is what editors call the “rich read”, meaning a lot to chew on. (I wrote a whole book on that, Writing 21st Century Fiction.)
Length does not by itself equal richness, of course, any more than girth equals health. That said, many of the tomes published today are great reads. Great reads of the past have also sometimes been door stoppers. Madam Bovary. Shogun.
For fiction writers, I think it’s more useful to think of two narrative modes: expansive and reductive. Expansive mode delves; reductive mode suggests. Both engage us, but in different ways. Both are valid.
Neither long nor short are automatically better. Neither represents the future of fiction. Both can be done well or poorly. It’s more a matter of the effect you want and how to get there.
As you’ve pointed out, though, in The Fire in Fiction, the more improbable the premise, the more words have to be carefully created to make the improbable not only possible but inevitable.
The challenge is making long books tight, not in writing shorter and leaving out everything.
Precisely because I have a chronically-ill character as one of three main characters which is unusual and different, the reader cannot be assumed to have the mental database to fill in the holes, not if developing empathy is subtext.
That means a longer book. No way around it.
And shorter books have a TV quality to them: things happen because the author says they happen, not because the experience of reading has persuaded the reader of their inevitability.
Visual input is conditioned in humans. So – even if something happens on a TV show or in a movie that makes the viewer say, “Oh, come on!” – the fact that it did happen, right there in front of the viewer, in glorious color and surround sound, gives it a credibility it doesn’t have.
But when the mind is constructing the universe of the story from words on the page, there is no automatic credibility effect, and the reader will stop reading if there are too many impossibles.
If the story requires it, the book has to be longer.
Great points, Alicia. I had not consciously compared the “reality” factor of TV vs novels, but I see what you mean. I recently read a book that had a couple of plot twists that just did not ring true to me, so I stopped reading. In one of the mindless TV shows that I sometimes follow, there was a plot twist of even less inevitability, but I kept on watching.
Elizabeth Bowen: “Dialogue should be brief. It should add to the reader’s present knowledge. It should keep the story moving forward.”
Add “show, don’t tell”, remove all adverbs, all passive voice, descriptions longer than one sentence, and every novel will clock at 20 thousand words or below…!
Thanks, Bjorn.
I recommend Joan Didion’s “The Last Thing He Wanted” — some of the most superb, tight dialogue in print. https://amzn.to/2FyV1Pv
Thanks for reading my column and dropping a note.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hi, Alicia,
I like this line very much from your comment: “The challenge is making long books tight, not in writing shorter and leaving out everything.”
There is a difference and not one that’s sometimes easily perceived. Writing tight is an art in itself — we’d do well to focus on this more in our authors’ training these days.
Thanks much,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
My words are scared to extinction of me – I have no darlings. I’m not perfect, but if the words arent’ doing double and triple duty – language, character, plot, theme – out they go.
Sol Stein pointed out (ages ago in my learning) that it’s not that there’s anything wrong with adverbs, it’s that they often prop up weak verbs.
For example, ‘remove all the adverbs’ is silly, but tightening up your adverb use should be second nature – and cuts the word count.
The problem is that this is work – everything gets scrutinized and paraded under the spotlight – and way too many indies are trying to get to market before they do the work. And if you hope an editor will fix it all for you, you will continue to make the same mistakes.
Hi, Don, from Abu Dhabi — the jump from Athens (World Book Capital) to the UAE (Abu Dhabi International Book Fair) interrupted me in mid-responses.
Really good points, particularly about the “expansive” and “reductive” modes. I agree that each has its place. And, as you say, it’s folly to decree that all work should be shorter (or longer).
At the same time, I do wish that many writers would look at the market from time to time and become more conscious about the lengths of their writes — because I meet so many writers who think there’s something wrong with everyone else (that damned buying public! lol) if their work doesn’t sell through the roof.
It’s a bit like the difference in originality and perverse quirkiness. One is something worth cultivating and challenging, the other is simply self-flattery.
And too frequently, the idea that “Oh, MY work should be as long as I want” can keep the market from finding good work that simply had the misfortune to be created by indulgent hands.
Believing that one’s work should run on at time-wasting length in a distraction-laden era is actually a form of magical thinking. Helping good writers to get past that and to learn the grace of economy and precision is a kindness, not a reprimand. Expansive, yes, if warranted. Far more frequently than not, I’m guessing, reductive would better hit home.
Flowers for Algernon, such a good example. And my recollection is that Nevil Shute — for whom we’ve talked bout our shared respect before — wasn’t known for excessive verbiage. Round the Bend and On the Beach, as I remember them, were hardly overwritten.
It’s definitely case-by-case. And I think each case is made better by taking care to consider whether it’s got its best chance to find its readers in a market that simply is becoming shorter in its attention spans and more contested in its interests. Reality, I think, can pay off. Especially if we appy it earlier than later.
Thanks again for the cogent comment, Don, always enlightening!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I enjoyed My Name Is Lucy Barton (Strout 191 pages) and An American Marriage (Jones 308 pages) more than I did The Great Alone (Hannah 440 pages) and A Gentleman in Moscow (Towles 462 pages). Now on to editing my own work!
Was A Gentleman In Moscow really 462 pages? Seemed so much shorter than most 250-page novels I’ve read. Over far too quickly.
I don’t think the problem is with long reads. Length didn’t hurt Harry Potter’s last novel. The problem is with books that seem long.
That’s correct, David. There are still plenty of long reads that are well worth the time and effort. I think the problem is cosmetic in many ways — if a media-bombarded reader looks at 462 pages and balks (and I like A Gentleman in Moscow, myself, very much), then the sale can be lost. So to some degree, good work may at times fall victim to the sheer entertainment-weary reality of today’s consumer exhaustion.
Thanks for your note.
-p.
On Twitter: Porter_Anderson
Love these choices, Beth, nicely done!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
My favorite short works: Where the Red Fern Grows, Daisy Miller, The Old Man and the Sea, Fahrenheit 451, and a contemporary fave, The Damned by Andrew Pyper.
Am I conscious of my reader’s time? Sigh, if only I had readers. (I am a beginner, no published novels.) But I am staying within and on the shorter end of my genre when writing drafts, so I guess that qualifies as a yes.
Rikki Tikki Tavi is one of my favorites.
Great to be reminded of Rikki Tikki Tavi, Becca, thank you!
(And sorry for the travel delays, 12 days on the road here.)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Complaint to professor from Twitter generation college students as they critique a paper: TLTR. Too long to read. Be on alert: These are our current and future readers.
Such an excellent warning!
This is what I’m trying to signal at many points to the industry, DivaJo and, alas, while our best people in publishing are aware of it, they’re slow to realize they need to act — take it seriously, work on responses, sort through ways of answering what is a very real-world condition today of too little time and too much content.
Very much appreciate your reading me and dropping a line.
(And sorry for the travel delays, 12 days on the road here.)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
First book that comes to mind for me is Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. A childhood friend of mine sent it to me (he is married to Uzo’s sister) and I was stunned to see such a slim novel. It had been a while!
In the industry, often shorter works get called novellas and no one I work with seems to know how to sell a novella. Just that name seems to taint a book somehow. I think it works with ebooks better than printed books sometimes because when you buy an ebook you often don’t pay attention to the length so that doesn’t factor in to your decision to buy. But holding a book in your hand is different.
I think I’m generally more likely to go with a slimmer volume than a doorstop. To me it indicates a small story closely observed, which is some of my favorite type of work.
Hey, Erin,
I’m with you on “novella” — the term itself seems offputting to many and a lot of people in the industry don’t know what to do with it. I also agree that in digital form, we think a lot less about length because there’s no physical size to a book. Makes quite a difference in the reader’s psychological preparation for a work, I find.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting!
(And sorry for the travel delays, 12 days on the road here.)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
If novels go the way of other communication platforms, the One-Minute Shakespeare Company plays, short stories and slow-flash fiction (just made that up) might become the go-to work of the 2020’s.
Lucia Nevai’s SALVATION is brilliant.
I’ll add Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
With books that feel too long, I find that as a reader the issue often isn’t length per se but bloat – i.e., information that doesn’t serve the story and mucks up the pacing.
I wonder…how much of this comes down to money? (Doesn’t everything these days?) Would the tome lose weight if the creator wasn’t on such a short leash to publish, or needed the funds to feed his starving kids? Would so-so short works bloom into world-changing longer works if the author could really focus (like, really focus) on the writing, and not how quickly her next book needs to churn?
I wonder…how much of this comes down to how our words are valued?
Just a thought, of course. I don’t have time to give it more consideration. My WIP is chewing up the machine and my kids are hungry.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT (Gift of Travel)
I think my favorite short read is A Movable Feast. I haven’t particularly encountered any short reads in my modern fiction consumption.
I don’t really know what to say about this – I think that a story is what it is – whether it ends up being 50K or 100K. I don’t think writers should strive to lengthen a story nor to shorten it. I think they should strive to write the best story they can, without being overly concerned about length.
Hugh Howey is notorious for writing short books – his first ‘novel’ was technically a short story, wasn’t it? No disrespect intended but brevity is probably something in his writer’s DNA.
I certainly don’t think anyone is writing 1,000 page books and if they are – then they better be darn good or split into a series. But in terms of physical books, it’s pretty common to see them coming in at 400-450 pages.
Maybe I am just a little weary of ‘trends’ – a couple years ago, surveys were saying readers wanted longer books. Now apparently books are supposed to be shorter. Maybe I’ll just keep writing and hope that at some point whatever I’m doing is on-trend and popular. Could happen. :)
Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, 166 pages, 40,000 words and he makes every one of them count.
CG, that is one lovely read, I remember it well as soon as you mention it and I hadn’t thought of it for years. Thanks for jogging my memory with a great title!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
My edition of Seize The Day by Saul Bellow crosses the finish line at 120 pages.
Here’s the thing, though: Bellow won the Nobel Prize, but by the end of his long career he had almost slipped off the literary graph. You can say his fate resulted from changing tastes, or (more accurately in my view) a growing inability to focus attention without visual or auditory stimulation.
People can sit for hours in front of a computer screen, or binge-watch TV shows. But that’s because the work is being done for them.
The value of words depends on a willingness to put in the work they require. I think this willingness is in decline, and not just among those who read little or nothing to begin with.
If you believe I’m exaggerating, consider the sordid political grip that has seized our own day. Some of the most intelligent investigative journalism I can remember is being written right now, but only a few people actually read it. The rest of us are having it served up nightly with sound and light by TV personalities. Instead of being food for thought, the words serve as soundtracks for film footage. The words figure for one or two news cycles, then are replaced by the next Daily Outrage. But the film clips go on being recycled indefinitely.
Do you remember what’s said as James Comey crosses a reception room for the hundredth or thousandth time to shake the President’s hand, then lean down to be whispered to?
Someone mentioned Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as a favorite short novel. If you want to know what’s happening right now, give it a read. It won’t take long.
Well said, Barry. Well said.
A part of what you’re observing, Barry — as I keep saying to anyone who’ll listen, lol — is that television and film are getting better. Even in the news world you’re discussing, the investigative journalism and how it’s presented is rising to the moment of the Trumpian crisis and is of a much higher quality than a lot of televised news has been in the past. It’s not just print that’s better under this emergency, in other words.
And in literature, the concept that some have trouble handling is that “find television” — I use the term like “find dining” or “fine art” — is on the rise. What HBO, Amazon Studios, Netflix, Showtime, Hulu, the BBC, Canal Plus and others are doing is extremly good work, well crafted storytelling that’s getting better and better. A story can be fully satisfying when received as such. A good example for me is Versailles, a terrific series from BBC and Canal in France, written by the nephew of Helen Mirren, Simon Mirren. The production is so eloquent that I feel no need to find a book edition of it by Simon Mirren or anyone else. It’s a completely satisfying delivery of a terrifically concocted piece.
This, I think, is what we need to be aware of. In the past, we could easily say that “the book is always better.” But as television now comes into its own dramatically in such powerful presentations, that may not be the case anymore. The book may not be better.
And in that case, publishing people need to consider what this means. About storytelling and reading. For a long time, many of us have thought of reading / books as the fundamental storytelling context. What if that is changing?
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
If you leave out the middle there will be a hole between the beginning and the end.
I have some favorite short novels, but they aren’t really novels. They are novellas or novelettes or long short stories.
(I love Ethan Frome.)
More than a question of length, I think, it’s about propulsion and purpose in the center part of a story. I think there’s a tendency for some writers to feel they can “relax” the pace a bit in the middle, and that, of course, doesn’t work. As long as a reader feels that a story is still being driven forward, the “middle” isn’t really that, just part of the ride.
Thanks!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I actually never gave this much thought, but my two favourite books – “The Hours” by Michael Cunningham, and “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng are very short. Word count of “Little Fires Everywhere” is about 79 thousand (yes, I checked) and none of those words is unnecessary. On the other end of the scale is Kate Mosse’s “Labyrinth” – I don’t know how many pages it has, but halfway through the e-book I just didn’t feel the urge to go on any longer. And I never managed to finish Harry Potter series, because book four has 20293820935820938509 pages and I just _couldn’t_.
At the same time, my husband flat-out refuses to buy thinner books, because he feels he isn’t getting enough book for his money (his exact words). Harry Potter boxed sets are his most prized possessions, and I am talking both books (in two languages) and extended cuts of the movies. The one thing we both agree on is that someone needs to weld George RR Martin to a chair and not let him go anywhere until he finishes The Bloody Winds Of Damned Winter Just Put It Out Already.
So glad to hear you mention Cunningham’s “The Hours,” one of my favorites, too. In general, Michael is quite economical, maybe with the exception of “A Home at the End of the World,” but that was rather early in his work. Looks like 353 pages in print in current editions. https://amzn.to/2HN2Nva
There’s an interesting parallel to the thing of wanting “a lot of book for the money.” At Audible, they find that when people have their one token per month to spend on an audiobook (the subscription supplies one free book monthly), they choose long audiobooks because they feel they’ll get more for their money that way. :)
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Virtually any British thriller from the Fifties and Sixties. Compare them to today’s thriller tomes.
Correct, David. Remember Helen McInnes’ work? Some of the very best and never a long read. https://amzn.to/2JRkmXp
Thanks,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Honestly, I can’t think of one book I read that I considered the length, unless I was bored.
I can think of “normal-sized” books I’ve read that I didn’t wish to end (those are the best!), and loooooooooong books I’ve read that I may skim parts (my brother and I were avid Stephen King readers ‘back in the day’ – and we began calling his writing style “Kingiarrhea”).
But then again, I’ve been reading books since I was 4 or 5 years old and I’m pretty old now —that’s LOTS o’ books! They’ve all smooshed together in my brain—long, short, in-between – just make me want to follow the character and I don’t care about the length.
Love “Kingiarrhea,” Kathryn!
This goes to the point that Hugh Howey and I were agreeing on, that the “greats” can become untouchables in editing and thus end up without the kind of guidance and economy that the author needs. A sad commentary on the commercial realities of success, of course.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Gerard Donovan’s “Julius Winsome” comes to mind. Hits the reader sharp and hard, and lingers for a very long time.
In German speaking countries, new authors are adviced to aim for 260 pages to streamline their chances, because that length (or shortness, for American standards) is cheaper to edit and print than longer or shorter pieces, so editors are more willing to take on the risk of a first novel. The average novel is about 180 to 320 pages around here. There has been a strong counter-trend to the shortened attention span going on for a while now: readers crave really big books to get fully immersed again. Which leads to even more bestseller translations from English speaking countries flooding the crowded market. Few indigenous authors tackle those sizes, true – or they’re told by their editors that readers won’t tackle them despite the evidence.
In the francophone parts (France and Western Switzerland), most novels tend to be only 80 to 120 pages long. I’m so jealous of my francophone writer friends who crank out a tiny novel every eight months or so… While I have a hard time getting my first novel translated into French, because it’s too huge in their eyes (340 pages). It’s all very relative, you see.
Most of what I said doesn’t apply to genre fiction though. Crime, SF, historical novels, fantasy, romance etc. are big books for the most part.
Hi, Ursula,
These are interesting points with which I’m familiar (about the European factors) from my work with Publishing Perspectives and Frankfurter Buchmesse.
Isn’t it interesting that in times like these, advice can go both ways: (1) Write shorter books because the public’s attention span is shorter, and (2) write longer books because some die-hard readers want to resist the shorter works and immerse themselves in “big books.” It really gives you the option (or the burden) to go either way.
I do think the shorter read is a great token of the realm in the French market. For example, I found Patrick Modiano’s “Accident Nocturne’ incredibly compelling in part because it’s only 177 pages.
And as for that good advice to German writers, I do think we should rememer that “writing short” can actually be much harder than writing longer work. It takes real effort to achieve the economy we’re talking about, not only from authors but also from editors, so I think it’s smart to remember that in many ways we’re asking for more work, not less, when we talk about considering a need for less length.
Thanks again, great to have you at the site and commenting!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Two of my favourite sci-fi novels come in nice and snug, getting the job done with almost zero padding (Fahrenheit 451 – 46k, and Brave New World – 64k).
Both excellent choices, Brian, thanks for them and for reading the column!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson