On Word Length and Bisection
I’ve read a lot about writing in the last few years. The resources available on YouTube are frankly amazing.
One of the oft-discussed topics is ideal word length. The literary novel is not supposed to go over 110,000 words and can be as little as 80,000. Science fiction – more accustomed to the ‘brick’ novels of many of the early writers – takes a more relaxed view, with 125,000 or even 150,000 being unremarkable.
As a former journo, I’m quite used to word length restrictions. I started my career on a typewriter and we’d often have to hack out 250 words in 15 minutes for an emergency news story if a scheduled piece wasn’t going to work.
Moving into features, I soon learned to write to the 800 words mark or, if there were pages to fill, to 1,500 or even 2,000.
When it came to my novel, though, I luxuriated in the longer form. No, I indulged myself. Individual sections often lolloped beyond 5,000 words, some oozed beyond 8,000. Reading it back felt like wading through a nine-course dinner at a restaurant famed for its foie gras and butter-fried everything.Wafer thin mint, anybody?
One day, with the climax in sight, I looked at the word count: 254,000. I was suddenly panic-stricken. This was far too long. Way waywayyyyyyyyyy too long. But how was I going to tell the whole tale in fewer? Hack it back to the plot spine and rely on sketched characters? Lose whole plotlines or foundational ideas?
I reflected on it over the weekend in the company of Messrs Malbec and Merlot, and the solution came to me like a thunderbolt when I woke up on Monday morning. I’d simply cut it in two and have Book Two partially completed before I’d even started it. Hurrah! And owwww, my head…
Simply? Ha! Cutting the book in two was far from simple. It was awful.
I chose a natural end-point for the new Book One, but quickly realised that some of my favourite writing would have to go in the second book, and that one of the most important sub-plots in the original needed to become the main plot line of Book Two.
That done, it occurred to me that one of my main characters – and all that pertained to her – would have to be excised from Book One. That quickly got ugly. Other ‘flat’ characters came and went as I attempted major surgery on my Magnum Opus without destroying the overall thrust of it.
What I sent to my beta panel (see previous blog) was, then, something Mary Shelley might have written about. Yes, it looked vaguely like a novel, yes it could walk and make grunting sounds, but early responses indicated it was far from perfect.
More reflection. More surgery. But at least it was still standing.
And it’s only 140,000 words, with the imminent major edit shortly to cut bloody chunks from it as well as pare down some of my more extensive frolicking.
And hey, Book Two is 75% of the way there. And the weird thing is that it almost works better than Book One…