Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall links to an interesting piece by jazz musician Eric Felton over at the Wall Street Journal. I don’t think Felton will make a whole lot of enemies with his complaint about the unnecessary length of much current entertainment, such as movies, music and books.
It will be objected that any number of canonic masterpieces are gargantuan. Yes, of course. But even many of those could stand a trim. Did “Moby Dick” really need the chapter called “Cetology,” Melville’s rambling effort to prove that whales weren’t mammals?
One of the constant occasions for worry in my novel-writing career has been that, once I write the story I want to tell, I generally find it’s only about 60- to 80,000 words long. Jim Baen liked novels to come in around 100,000 words. I believe he felt (and many publishers today are of the same view) that when a consumer plunks down $7.99 for a paperback novel, he wants to feel he can take a short vacation in that book’s world.
The idea of publishing shorter books, and charging less, is not up for discussion, it would appear.
As a consumer of books, I have to admit I like buying thick books, especially when they’re by authors I love. “More time with Andrew Klavan! More time with Michael Connelly! I’ll pay for that!”
But I wonder if the larger situation isn’t partly a response to the habits of today’s authors.
You may be surprised to learn this, but many authors find it easier to write long than short. Most writers need to learn to cut their prose, not to lengthen it. Some of these books, which can’t be carried in briefcases because they’re thicker than the briefcases, cry out to be ruthlessly cut by an editor. But today’s publishers don’t spend a lot of money on editors, and they try to keep the editors they do pay turning manuscripts over as fast as possible. A book gets a couple quick passes, and that’s it (you’ve noticed, of course, the plague of typographical errors that has descended upon the land in the last couple decades?). Just as it’s less work to write long, it’s less work to publish long.
(I should mention, for the record, that my editor at Nordskog, Desta Garrett, is a masterful and exacting proofreader. And it shows in the final product.)
But in the industry at large, authors are in need of editing, just as fat people (like me) in society at large are in need of personal trainers.
Future generations will recall us as The Age of the Fat Book and the Fat Citizen.
Picture credit: Corbis.
Yes, I’ve seen this too. As a slow reader, I don’t like long, rambling works. If I feel an author should have trimmed his story by several hundred words, he loses my respect (generally speaking).
I don’t mind reading longer stuff like YoTW because it’s, like, really good. I never felt there were wasted passages. But there are plenty of authors (*cough* Stephen King *cough*) who make me think of the value of a ruthless editor.
The early English novels (at least the ones we hear about) were usually very long. Wasn’t it the Victorians who gave us the triple decker? (One novel in 3 volumes.)
– I don’t have a favorite length; if the book is good you want it to be long; if it’s no good you wish it were short.
– I understand the current rage for trilogies is basically because they tend to sell better.
The idea of publishing shorter books, and charging less, is not up for discussion, it would appear.
The main limiting factor on Baen is that Simon & Schuster will only take six books a month from them. Sometimes they take seven, but then a few months later or earlier they take five.
Shorter books would have to sell significantly better to make the same with the lower price.
Interesting. I never knew that.
Another factor would be the ratio of fixed to variable costs. Marketing expenses tend to remain the same whether a book is 80 pages or 800 pages. Since most of the cost of a book is in the distribution and marketing, longer books tend to water down the fixed expenses, giving the feel of more value for the money.
Americans seem to be worse than the British in this regard. In a memoir of James Herriot, his son noted that his dad’s first six novels were published as three books in the USA. He was told that Americans wouldn’t buy skinny books.
Another factor here, I believe, is that authors are using dialogue to tell the story more than they did a couple of generations ago. Open a few recent high-profile books (e.g. by King) and compare with high-profile books from forty years or so ago (maybe Michener?) and I guarantee you’ll see more dialogue in the recent books.
Dialogue as given in current books is easy to read and tends to break the paragraphs into brief nuggets — so readers like it.
/Good/ dialogue is not necessarily easy to write, but dialogue is easy to write, so writers may like it. I have read many of Rider Haggard’s novels and have noticed how, after he began dictating his novels, the trend was: lots more dialogue; but the books generally weren’t as good as the earlier ones, as Haggard himself admitted.
Dialogue fills up pages and bulks out a book, so publishers, at least in America, will like that.
I think one more possible reason for use of dialogue is that authors and publishers, consciously or not, will feel that the book is more cinematic the more it uses dialogue with relatively brief narrative and descriptive patches — and thus likely to appeal to readers who watch lots of movies; and maybe there’s even the thought that moviemakers will be attracted.
Unfortunately, I think it is probably true that much of the greatness of the great novels inheres in non-dialogue passages, though, to be sure, someone like Dickens or Twain might have excelled with dialogue as well as other elements. But by approaching writing as, largely, a matter of writing (fast-moving) dialogue, an author may tend to reduce his chances of attaining greatness.
That’s an interesting angle.