Novels - How Long - A Different View

 Back on July 7, I published Novels - How Long?. Nathan Bransford published his Do readers really want shorter novels? on July 10. Mr. Bransford asked a pertinent question:

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?

He also makes a point 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!

When I started working again on writing fiction, there was one writer I found intolerable: James Patterson. They read like screen treatments to me. That said, I have converted one section of a novel I am working on into a novella for purposes of seeing the reaction of editors. I have another which is a science fiction story, which also rated as one of my two failures with the prison writing group, which I still want a go at and at the novella range. Science fiction seems better for a novella, and I am not sure if it is a longer story.  My point is I need to get something published, "Road Tripping" is ready to go, but for me the story determines length.

sch 7/12