Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [73]
There’s another advantage in writing long. If your book simply works best at a greater length than you had in mind for it, it may have greater commercial value than you planned.
There’s a paradox here that requires a word of explanation. On the one hand, the average thriller runs somewhere around sixty or seventy thousand words, and a book that runs substantially longer than that is going to present problems to a publisher of category fiction.
On the other hand, those occasional thrillers that turn up on the best seller list are generally a hundred to a hundred fifty thousand words long. The same length that would preclude their sale as paperback originals serves to swing them right up onto the hardcover sales counter.
The conventional explanation holds that longer books have more to them, that they have greater depth and stronger story values, that they are more to be taken seriously on account of their length. Because of these factors, such books are said to transcend their categories and appeal to readers who do not ordinarily read that type of novel.
Very often this is demonstrably true. Brian Garfield’s Hard Times is an epic novel of the Old West, with only its setting to link it with standard westerns. Any best seller list will yield similar examples.
Even so, other books turn up on the lists with nothing remarkable about them but their bulk. I read one recently, a detective novel by a writer who has produced some best-selling thrillers over the years. Unlike his other books, this had nothing special going for it; it was a standard straight-line detective plot told from a single point of view and overblown to a hundred fifty thousand words. It was a poorer book for its length, but a better seller because of it.
What it comes down to, I’m afraid, is that readers of best sellers—which is to say the majority of readers in this country—prefer long books. This is their right, certainly, and it is only sensible for the writer who wants to sell to this best seller audience to provide them with what they’re looking for.
It almost seems to be true that there’s no such thing as a book that’s too long to be commercially viable. For years publishers resisted overlong first novels, saying that higher production costs made such books even more unprofitable than trimmer first novels. Nowadays the trend is in the other direction. If a first novel is sufficiently substantial—and of course if it satisfies other commercial considerations as well—then it can be promoted and ballyhooed and even sold.
James Clavell’s novel Shogun had a long run as a best seller a couple of years back. While it was an engrossing reading experience for me all the way through, I could not avoid applying to it Dr. Johnson’s observation regarding Paradise Lost—i.e., no one ever wished it were longer. For all its 1,400 pages, and for all that more readers started it than finished it, the book was a literary and commercial success. Not too many years ago a publisher might have hesitated to bring out quite so long a novel, especially one set in medieval Japan. Clavell’s track record helped, certainly, but equally helpful I suspect was the growing recognition that great length helps more books than it hinders.
Does this mean you should aim from the beginning at long books?
No, not necessarily. It may mean that you shouldn’t try to hit the best seller list with a short book, any more than you should try to peddle a quarter of a million words as a paperback.
But your first object, remember, is to write your own kind of book. You’ll learn, from your own reading and as you begin writing, what sort of book suits you best. I’ve come to see that I myself am most comfortable writing relatively lean, spare volumes. This no doubt limits my potential from a commercial standpoint, but I’d be limiting myself rather more severely were I to force myself to write books that suited me less for purely commercial motives.
That said, it’s worth noting that a great many writers find themselves producing longer books as time goes by. This does