Category: length

Oh! Hello there. Yes, this is very overdue, isn’t it?

The past month has just been wild. The book tour. Thanksgiving. Three or four vet visits. Two or three doctor visits for me (minor stuff, in the big scheme, don’t worry). Assorted holiday activities.

Oh, and this book I’ve been editing. And another book I’ve been poking at.

It’s still really weird to me sometimes to think I’ve had over a dozen books published. Me! That’s not even counting all the short stories and collections. It’s just… weird.

Which leads me to this (very overdue) ranty blog post. I’d planned to do it waaaay back at the start of November but… y’know, maybe it’s better now, as we’re all starting to think about top ten lists and how much we got done and all that sort of thing. Those can be fun, but I think they can also be kind of demoralizing. It can be rough when you’re trying to find time to write while someone else is pounding out three or four books a year. Heck, even once you’re kind of established, it’s easy to watch people talk about all those end of year accomplishments and feel like… wow, I didn’t do much at all, did I?

One thing it took me a while to figure out was that a lot of us have very skewed ideas of the time frames involved when we talk about “how long things take” when it comes to art and artistic careers. F’r example, when I first started out, people thought I was ridiculously prolific because I had four really solid books (and a bunch of short stories) published in less than two and a half years. But it actually took five years to write all of that. Likewise, right now it looks like it took me three years to write God’s Junk Drawer, since that’s how long it’s been since The Broken Room came out. But I actually wrote three books in that time. You just haven’t seen them all yet. And when those start coming out, I’ll bet you anything someone pulls out the prolific label again.

Like, okay, how often do we (as a society) dwell on how long it was since someone started writing until they sold their first book? Once they decided to do this, how long did it take them to get published? It sounds straightforward, but all of these are kind of tricksy points in time. Like, okay, my first published novel (Ex-Heroes) was written in 2008 but it came out in early 2010. And there were a few novels before that one, but they didn’t sell. For good reasons.

And the starting point? When did I actually start writing? Well, if we use when I started telling stories as an eight year old (using my Death Star playset as a slowly-evolving diorama of Star Wars figures), then from that to first published novel was about thirty-two years. But if we go off when I first actually writing things out on my mom’s typewriter and my first attempt at a “novel” (the often-mentioned Lizard Men From the Center of the Earth), then we’re looking at about thirty years.

Then again, we could go off when I first tried submitting stuff (some just-as-awful comic book “scripts” to Marvel when I was eleven) and then it’s twenty-nine years from starting to write to first published novel. But those were comic book submissions, not novels soooooooooo… I don’t know. Do we count that? Yes? No?

If we want to start at when I actually learned how to submit (whoa, publishers and editors and agents have guidelines? who knew?), then I guess we’re looking at about twenty-two years from “starting to write” to “published novel.

We could also consider the college novel as my starting point, so now it was nineteen years. Or if we use the after college/ moved to California novel it was maybe seventeen.

Also, to be honest, for about seven years in there (while I was working in the film industry) I put books aside and just worked on screenplays. Had some mild success, too, relatively speaking. But like with the comic book scripts… should we count that time? Skip over it? Half-count it as general storytelling?

It was in 2001 that I decided I’m going to go back and finish the after-college novel. Polish it up, actually turn it into something I could submit. I remember the moment I decided it. So if we go from there, it only took nine years to get from “starting to write” to “published novel.”

And, of course, in late 2006 I left the film industry to focus on writing. Fiction and non-fiction. If we want to use *that* as the starting point… well, it only took me two years to sell a novel once I put my mind to it.

See what I mean? Those points are pretty damned flexible. Depending on how we want to look at it—and the story we want to tell—it can look like my career took forever to take off or I did it without much effort at all.

This is true of most books. There are early inspirations and ideas, first thoughts, outlines, drafts. Once we mix in behind the scenes stuff—like the very random amount of time between writing and publication—it’s not hard for people to look very slow or very prolific. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally.

Y’see Timmy, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over those end-of-year lists. I got a lot of stuff done. I bet you did, too. That’s what matters. Not how much someone else got done.

Next time…

Hell, next time is Christmas. And the Thursday after that is, well, next year. But I’ll still try to squeeze in one more post about… something? I’m taking requests, if there’s something you’d like to hear me blather on about.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a last minute gift– hey, maybe a copy of God’s Junk Drawer? No, no, Grandma will love it. Really.

Until then, go write.

Running a little late with this one, sorry. This fall/ early winter’s going to be very chaotic for me.

Last month when I was guest-hosting the Coffeehouse, we talked a bit about word count. Not in the sense of making your word count, but what publishers are generally expecting from books in different genres. Should we be aiming for those points as we write? Or do we just write with the acknowledgment we may need to cut some later?

Since this is something I have some experience with—some very recent, in fact—I thought it was worth talking about a bit more. It’s one of those things where we’re going to dance a little bit between writing and publishing, going back and forth between the art and business sides of the line.

First off, let me be clear up front– you should always write the story you want to tell. Always. Don’t try to chase a trend or guess what some agent or editor might want to see. The thing they want to see is your story, as you wanted to tell it. That’s what gets attention—the story with all that passion and energy and excitement.

For example, let me talk about two of my books. One of them—the one you know—is -14-. It was a wild, crazy story that had been bubbling in my mind for a while. I wrote it out, tightened it up, polished it and sent off the to the small press publisher I was working with at the time. He absolutely loved it. Told me it was one of the best things that’d he’d ever received as a submission and offered me a contract pretty much right then and there.

The other book is the one we just sold last month. If you’re subscribed to the newsletter, it’s the one I’ve been calling TOS. Three different publishers wanted it. And they all loved it. All of them talked about how much the loved the story, the characters, the writing, how it was equally playful and fun and terrifying.

So, let’s be clear. In both cases, the editors/ publishers loved the book I wrote. These book sold because I wrote the book I wanted to write and people could see that passion and excitement in it.

Then… the business aspect of this sets in.

In the case of -14- the small press used print on demand, and that meant there were very solid costs that came come down to specific page counts. One line past this page and the book goes up by X. Go past this page and it goes up by 3X. And the publisher either has to absorb those costs (not great) or pass them on to the customer (also not great). So the publisher loved it, but we had to make some serious cuts just to make the book affordable. No way around it.

And with TOS… well, it’s a book that definitely leans into horror, and most horror books tend to lean on, well, the lean side. Yeah, there’s some big, beefy horror books out there, but two editors—the final two, in fact, who wanted it the most—both made it clear the book was going to have to lose some weight. One thought 20K. The other thought closer to 35K.

Yeah. Scary thought, isn’t it? Happy October!

As a slight aside, I think this is one of those things that makes people say “Big publishers will make you change everything about your book!” And on one hand, yeah, they’re absolutely asking me to change things. Kind of insisting on it, in fact. But they’re not just doing it at random. Remember, they bought my book because they like my book. Why else would they have bought it? But this is definitely a business vs. art thing.

Also please keep in mind—none of this is me saying we can ignore actual submission guidelines. If anything, this is kind of making that case. If somebody doesn’t want to see anything over 100K words and my manuscript’s currently at 135K… well, I’ve got some cutting to do if I want to submit to them.

Anyway…

All this brings me to an exercise I wanted to bounce off you, especially for those folk working on an early draft of a first novel (but it works for everyone, so don’t feel shy). I want you to imagine, right now, you open up your email and you’ve got an acceptance letter. That publisher you sent your book to likes it They love it! They want it, they want to sign you, it’s a done deal. There’s only one catch…

You need to cut 20,000 words out of the book. It has to be shorter. Maybe it’s a marketing thing, a financial thing, a random decision from someone higher up the food chain. But you must lose 20,000 words. They’re willing to sign that big contract with you today, but there’s no negotiation on that point. 20K gone before it can see print.

So, let’s open up our latest draft and take a long, hard look at it.

What can go?

No, come on. What can go? Do we really need all that description? Every one of of those funny dialogue exchange? All that banter? Does Phoebe need that little soliloquy about rediscovering the sanctity of life?

What really happens in that driving chapter? Yeah, Phoebe gets Dot caught up on everything, sure, but the reader already knows all of it. I’m just repeating information, having her re-tell it to Dot. And wouldn’t we probably assume she told her if they just got out of the car an hour and fifty miles later and Dot said “So that’s all of it?”

Do we need Wakko at all? No, seriously. What does Wakko do in this story? He makes some random comments, carries some stuff at one point, has a few funny lines, but does he actually affect the plot or Phoebe’s story in any way? Would anything at all change if we just cut him out altogether?

Be honest– would it? Think hard, because we have to cut 20K words.

I’ve already cut two full chapters out of TOS. Big, full chapters. One was near the end, and it was sort of a fun, pushing-the-conceit-of-the-book bit that also helped show how horribly wrong things had gone. One was closer to the beginning, and it played with another conceit while also… damn, it had one of my favorite passages in the book. One of those bits that was simple but also kind of deeply, under-your-skin creepy. And that might just be gone for good. It’s so situation-specific I’m not sure I could ever use it for anything else. But ultimately, that three-quarters of a page is the only reason this whole chapter exists. Everything else in it is kind of redundant.

So right there… almost 5000 words cut out of the 20K my editor’s asking for.

One more time, I’m not saying we should plan on this—again, write the book you want to write. But it’s worth thinking about. Because no matter who we’re writing for, we’re going to have to edit and tighten cut. That’s a basic part of the process.

And if I’m finding it really easy to cut something out… well, maybe that’s a sign it wasn’t needed in the first place.

Next time, I’d like to talk about that phaser rifle Chekov left on the bridge

Until then, go write.

There’s an idea I heard once or thrice on movie sets. You may have heard it, too. The KISS principle—an acronym for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” It’s basically a warning to people not to overcomplicate things just for the sake of overcomplicating them. It’s something I’d see a lot in the film industry, usually with less experienced and/ or very stubborn people. The most common example would be directors who tried to do time-consuming, overly complex shots… just so they could do complex shots.

I’d see it in a lot of screenwriting too, especially in the lower budget stuff I tended to work on. The script would be packed with subplots and B-stories and side threads that… didn’t really serve a purpose. If I was in an angrier state that day (and I’ll be honest, I was angry and frustrated a lot when I worked in the film industry) I tended to call it “padding” or “a waste of time.”

Probably the key thing is that more often than not, the final product was uneven. Episodes would have pacing or tone issues. Sometimes they’d just be confusing because the camera was bouncing around for no apparent reason.

And the thing is, a lot of these shots and subplots and random chunks of dialogue weren’t actually bad. It’s just that they weren’t really relevant to what we were doing. I’ve heard a phrase in gardening that a weed is just the right plant in the wrong place. Well in these examples… it was all weeds.

Okay, what’s my point here? Besides making myself grumbly by remembering certain persons and projects and issues…

Allow me to explain. With a sort of follow-up to the explainer, too.

What’s happening here is the storytellers are getting in their own way. F’r example, with the directors, they’re so hung up on telling the story in a clever way (the overly complex shots) that they’re not focused on actually telling the story. Or, in some cases, they’re actually twisting the story to allow for the clever shot.

With the screenwriters, they’d be packing so many subplots or random conversations into a forty-two minute television episode that none of them really got developed in any way. We’d start dealing with one and then have to rush off to deal with another one before people forgot about it. Or the ideas would collide head on, which led to analyzing the story instead of… y’know, enjoying it.

I’ve talked about this problem before—where a plot or story is just overpacked with ideas. And when this happens, the plot will overwhelm the story or the story will smother the plot or sometimes they’ll just collapse into this mess of well… random plot and story points.

This is a tough idea to grasp when you’re starting out, because it just feels wrong and counterintuitive to everything we’ve been led to believe. If the idea’s good, how can it be wrong for a story? I mean, an idea’s good or it’s not, right?

Truth is, I can have a really, really cool idea and sometimes it just doesn’t work in the tale I’m telling. Maybe it doesn’t fit tonally or maybe it slows things down too much or maybe… it just doesn’t fit. If something’s not driving the plot or the story, if it’s pulling us too far off course, or if it’s just filling space I could use for something else… it probably doesn’t belong there.

I’m a big believer in simplicity for, well, a simple reason. And it’s that we’re always going to complicate things. It’s what we do as storytellers. No matter how basic and straightforward a plot is, we’re always going to come up with interesting details and descriptions and clever subplots and little character quirks. And then all that new material inspires some new descriptions and different subplots and suddenly hey, did you know the barista over there was actually Abraham Lincoln in a past life? No, really, she was. It’s a reverse-Zeno’s paradox, where we’re always getting further and further from the end because we’re always discovering new things to flesh out our world and our characters.

Now, granted, yes, some of this is going to get cut. Maybe a lot of it. So on one level it’s easy to say “so what if I decide to do something super complex?” And believe me, I’m a serious fan of wonderfully complex storytelling.

But I’ll point out that when I start complex, I’m not leaving myself a lot of room to explore and grow. If things are dense from the beginning, it’s going to be harder and harder to discover new character facets and justify clever descriptions or go off on little side-stories for a page or three.

Why is that?

Well, that’s my follow-up thing…

If you’ve been doing this for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard someone say something along the lines of “the story is as long as it needs to be.” And to a large extent, this is true. I can make the story whatever it needs to be. Any length at all. Fifty pages long to five hundred pages long. If I need six books to tell this story correctly, then I need six books. That’s how art works.

But…

The rough reality is that there are a lot of limits on how long a story can be.

Let’s put a few feet between us and books for a minute and think about movies again. I think we all agree full-length movies are generally in the ninety minutes to two hours range. It’s just how it is. When a movie’s only seventy-plus minutes… we feel a bit cheated. It can be really good, but we almost always feel like “That’s it? Only seventy-one minutes?” Likewise, when a film stretches out over two and a half hours, it usually feels pretty excessive. There are a few really great three-hour movies out there, but there’s also a lot of really bloated, desperately-in-need-of-editing ones. So no matter how good it is, if my script isn’t in the 90-130 page range… well, I might get some folks to look at it, but not many professionals are going to consider it seriously. It’ll just be one of those “great but unfilmable” screenplays.

And there are lots of reasons for this. How long a movie is will affect how long it takes to make the movie, which will affect how much it costs to make the movie. Plus, longer movies can’t be screened as many times at a theater, which means money’s going to be slower coming back in. And let’s be honest—how many of us have time to watch a really long movie? No matter how good I hear it is, if I see something’s three hours and twenty minutes long… I’m going to be hesitant to sit down. Hell, I friggin’ loved Avengers: Endgame, but I still haven’t even rewatched it at home. I just don’t have the time.

And if I’m talking about publishing… well, there’s a lot of publishing limits. Paper costs money. And shelf space in book stores is precious. Most publishers don’t want to see a massive, beef-slab of a book unless they know they’re going to sell a lot of copies of it. Even if we’re talking about short stories, most markets only have so much room in their magazine or anthology. If someone’s asking me for three-to-six thousand words, I can’t offer them nine thousand and expect to get an acceptance letter.

Now, I’m sure all that makes a few folks eager to talk about the wonderful freedom of self-publishing. But as I’ve mentioned before, self-publishing means I’m the one making the publisher-level financial decisions. A lot of print on demand sources work off page length to calculate costs, and they’ve got very firm price ranges. Just a few pages this way or that can mean a difference of three or four dollars per copy. And somebody’s got to eat that cost. And it’s not going to be the printer. So it’s either me or my readers.

Some of you may recall this is why I had to cut almost 30,000 words out of my original manuscript for 14. It was with a small press, and the publisher just couldn’t afford to have it stretch into the next page-range. That’s all there was to it. Lose 30K words or it doesn’t get published.

Heck, even if I give up on print and just go with epublishing, check the numbers. Shorter books do better as ebooks, especially from self publishers. The vast number of folks who’ve had any degree of success with ebooks are doing it with books under 100,000 words. I think many of them are under 70,000. The “why” of this is a whole ‘nother discussion we could debate for a while, but for now we just need the simple numbers. Ebooks tend to do better as shorter books.

Y’see, Timmy, storytellers have limited space. Those pages are precious. My words are precious. I don’t want to waste them on irrelevant things. I want them to be moving things along for the plot and for my characters. I want the ideas to work for my story, not to be flexing and contorting my story to accommodate some random ideas.

There’s another phrase you’ve probably heard—kill your darlings. This is kinda like that. I may have the sharpest comeback, the neatest way to explain something, or the most fantastic description of a werewolf, but if it doesn’t work in my story…

Well, then it doesn’t work.

And if it doesn’t work, it probably shouldn’t be there.

Next time, unless someone has a question or request, I’m probably going to talk about leftovers.

Until then… go write.

I’d already planned this week’s topic and then the writing discourse, as some call it, veered toward length anyway. So call it happy coincidence. Or serendipity.

Like, we’ve talked before about how long it takes to write a book. Some folks consider the starting point when they started outlining. Some consider it when the idea first struck them. And others say they started writing when they typed Chapter One.

And when did I start writing? When I was eight and blocking out original Star Wars stories in my Kenner Death Star playset? When I started using my mom’s massive electric typewriter? When I first started submitting stuff? When I started writing the first novel I actually finished? When I quit my film job to start writing full time? When I quit that job to start writing fiction full time? Any of these is a valid starting point, but they cover about thirty years.

Actually, before I talk about next time—if you happen to be of the reviewing type and have access to NetGalley, my new novel The Broken Room is now there and can be requested. For the rest of you… holy crap, only eighteen more days!