Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[zombiemutts]

Okay, let’s jump right in with a subject that’s weighed heavily on my mind for years: one of the main reasons, in fact, why this year I’ve officially made the leap from full-time novelist to full-time editor.

So let me spell out my arguments, in easy-to-manage bite-sized chunks. They’ll be easier to talk about that way!

1) I think most genre novels are too long by half. And that it’s a serious problem. One that – if properly addressed – could help excite tons of new readers. And seriously improve the quality of most books, as well.

But unaddressed – as it is now – it keeps much of the genres marginalized, by knocking the overall quality way down.

Here’s why:

2) I think, in most cases, their length is artificially inflated to meet a marketplace expectation that books should be 300-some pages long.

The problem is, most of them don’t have 300 great pages in ‘em. And so they’re forced to pad themselves out with all kinds of narrative and linguistic filler. (More on these in a moment.)

and more John Skipp

[Lane Adamson]

I wouldn't swear to the WHY of it, but there's a general surfeit of wordiness going on all over novel-land (not just in genre-ville).  It's an on-going issue that dates back to the days when writers got paid paid the word, even for full-length manuscripts.

I have seen lots of books, on the other hand, that told cracking good tales in 75-90K words.  Most Louis L'Amour westerns, the original run of the Destroyer series, and also the Executioner, fit this model.  They were formulaic in some cases (especially when Sapir and Murphy weren't speaking to each other), but the prose was taught, to the point, and (most importantly) moved the story along in an entertaining manner.

There's no reason this can't be done here and now, regardless of genre.  Just needs a willingness of author and publisher to sacrifice heft for a tight, motorvating story.

[Joe Mynhardt]

After only writing short stories for several years now, I'm finding it difficult to inflate stories into novel length. I'll reach the 60K mark with my first book, but I just decided to keep my story as tight as possible, which is how I learned to write.