Category Archives: word count

September 18, 2015   Jessica   cutting, debut fiction, editing, Jessica, word count  
1

Out of Time

I’m in the midst of editing a novel that needs to be cut down by a third and I confess, wiping out broad swaths of thoughtful, beautifully composed prose is not easy, even for someone who believes in a stringent edits the way some folks believe in juice cleanses, never going to sleep angry, or a morning constitutional. So I found John McPhee’s piece on Writing By Omission
especially helpful. In truth, most everything McPhee writes about writing is instructive, smart, subtle and so well built as to have no seams showing. A piece that at first seems meandering and conversational is invariably a feat of engineering (for more on this see McPhee on structure.)

How do you decide what to cut? In her recent post, Erin cited Hemingway’s counsel to “write drunk and edit sober.” Does that method work for you? When charged with transforming your shaggy dog sort of tale into a sleek greyhound, do you agonize, rail, sulk or simply get down to the business of shearing? I’m a bit of a railer—after all, I LIKE long books, I’m a devotee of the doorstop. In my own weird universe, a dense book means a longer stay in the world of the story. And who wouldn’t welcome an extra week’s vacation?

Of course, the industry in which I work rarely shares my view, and I’d be a poor sort of agent not to communicate this to my clients. Most any book above 150K words is a non-starter, especially for first time authors; why? First, there’s the high production costs of a printing, shipping and storing a brick of a book, but it’s also true that people are understandably parsimonious with their time. Publishers are afraid that long novels are off-putting. Maybe that’s true. There are certainly plenty of other contenders for our leisure–social media, online games, clever, much-talked-about TV. But that the otherwise smart site Medium.com actually estimates how much time it will take its readers to complete a piece actually offends me. The delight of reading is that it is atemporal. That the words—whether on a page or screen or read by an actor from an audiobook–vanish and with them, any sense of regular time passing.
I can read on a page or a screen with equal ease, but cutting is a task that is best done on paper, and not electronically. There is something bloodthirstily satisfying about a diagonal slash through a page that the Kindle highlight function cannot match. How do you, as F. Scott Fitz may or may not have said, kill your darlings?

October 07, 2014   sharon   editing, grammar, Sharon, word count, writing  
4

Crisp.

Last week I read a great suggestion from the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt: “Be crisp in your delivery.” Keeping this in mind, I’m getting to the point at the beginning of every email and controlling my tendency to over-explain the background.

The whole article, 9 Rules for Emailing from Google Exec Eric Schmidt, is very clear and useful, but Rule No. 2 is the one that’s really stuck with me. (And wouldn’t you know, it’s the one that quotes a writer!)

crisp2. When writing an email, every word matters, and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in your delivery. If you are describing a problem, define it clearly. Doing this well requires more time, not less. You have to write a draft then go through it and eliminate any words that aren’t necessary. Think about the late novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer: “I leave out the parts that people skip.” Most emails are full of stuff that people can skip. 

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve consciously thought about frontloading my emails with the important point. Rather than a four-sentence lead-in, I’m being intentional about diving right in to the question I need answered or the solution I’m proposing.

And this tip is not just for emails! Similar to Leonard’s advice, Strunk & White famously suggested, “omit needless words.” Are you cluttering your prose with adverbs instead of strengthening your verbs? Are you bogging down your plot by overdescribing routines such as getting dressed or making dinner?

But the world needs Hemingways and Fitzgeralds – books aren’t simply information delivery systems. A memorable story has atmosphere and context, as well as plot; an effective essay illuminates extraordinary dimensions in something ordinary. 

How do you balance brevity and nuance in your own writing?

Have you found writing tips from any unexpected sources? 

 

August 30, 2013   Rachel   Rachel S., reading, word count  
1

Books, always being tricky

It’s common fact that we all judge books by their covers, but I know that I at least also make some pretty unfounded assumptions about a potential literary purchase based on its size. While I might be excited to dive into a lengthy tome if the subject interests me, it’s never one that I’ll expect to be “fun.” Small font, tissue-thin paper and a high page count might be impressive and I’ll probably feel a bit braggy for reading it in public, but the long, important looking books that end up being pulpy or zany or funny or really anything other than literary intellectual heavyweights are always a surprise.

I’ve talked before about being deceived by Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and I still think it’s the perfect example of a dull, yet intelligent looking book that turned out to be a completely engrossing, witty, darkly comic book about some crazy college kids that still reigns as one of my favorites today.

Publishers Weekly approached the topic with their announcement of the publication of A to ‘Zibaldone’, a collection of thoughts, musings and extrapolations from the notebooks of Gicomo Leopardi, who died way back in 1837. This tome weighs in at a whopping 2,500 pages and given the one line description, it’s definitely not something I would consider for completely pleasurable reading. However, the book is apparently incredibly engaging! PW calls is a “nightstand book rather than a doorstopper” and even recommends it as a possible beach read…providing you have the upper arm strength and bag room to lug it around.

The assumption of course goes the other way, too, as there are plenty of tiny books I’ve picked up on a whim only to find them impossible to get into or sometimes even understand.

How about you? Are you intimidated by a high page count? What books have surprised you by completely betraying the prejudice of their length?

May 23, 2012   Miriam   e-books, editing, future of publishing, Miriam, word count  
10

The long…and the long of it

For a literature major it’s somewhat shameful to have to confess that I find really long books  daunting.  From the Steve Jobs biography to the Game of Thrones series (both of which are on my “what I want to read next” list) page counts north of 400 pages give me pause.  So many words, so little time.

Inveterate bookworm that I’ve always been, I remember the days when nothing was as exciting as having a giant doorstop of a book at hand and a school vacation (or even a sick day) providing unfettered hours of reading.  Now, with manuscripts, proposals, blogs, articles, e-mails and all the other content fighting for attention, a really long book produces something akin to apprehension, maybe anxiety.  Which is why I found Marc Wortman’s piece in The Daily Beast so interesting.

Of course, I’ve always been aware of the economics of publishing long books—we have, on occasion, advised authors to trim unwieldy manuscripts with the warning that editors are sometimes scared of fat tomes and not just because they take so much time to edit but because they are more expensive to produce.  Wortman’s argument that e-book pricing is encouraging authors to write more and publishers to cut less is, therefore, intriguing and not altogether surprising.

Dickens and other serial writers of the 19th century got paid for content, so more was definitely more.  Now, according to Wortman, publishers want to charge more for e-books and feel they can justify doing so by offering longer books.    Interesting theory.   Not sure there’s sufficient evidence to support it, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some truth to it.

How do you all feel about long books?  And, does it make a difference whether you’re reading them in print or on your e-reader?

April 22, 2011   Jessica   advice, Jessica, opinion, word count  
6

Length

I like long books. I finally read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (once again confirming the safe distance I maintain from the literary cutting edge). I enjoyed every blessed word. Other doorstops I have liked include: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Corrections, An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Power Broker, Wolf Hall and the list continues. That said, I am acquainted with of the hazards of nattering on. Most every day, I can witness my five-year-old tune out as I over-explain whatever gentle, educational, object-lesson- filled point I am trying to make.  Nothing like seeing the light of intellectual engagement switch off.

My enthusiasm for length, however, is finite, and pretty much stops where the query letter begins. Pitches for 150K first novels are usually non-starters, and 125K does its author no favors (200K and above is tantamount to self-immolation). Why? Lazy editors? Lazy readers? Hypocritical agents? Perhaps. But also, more often than not, unnecessary verbiage. I just looked at a collection of essays from a talented writer that were three times as long as they needed to be. My advice to him will be to lose two thirds of the material. Maybe three fourths. Or rewrite them as haiku. It’s hard not to fall in love with our own words, and many writers find the business of cutting excruciating.  One client of mine likened it to surgically removing his own tonsils. Much as he knew he did not really need them, there was still a lot of painful, mucky bloodletting along the way.

So what do you do when you suspect that something more than a judicious trim is in order? Or when you are convinced that every word is essential (also a reliable indication that you should unleash the red pen). Recruit a merciless fellow writer? Pretend to be a heartless editor/agent with zero respect for excellence and a mindless allegiance to word count? Or curse Jonathan Franzen for using up all the extra words?

March 25, 2011   Rachel   editing, fun, Rachel S., word count, writing  
4

On and on and on and on

I’ve never really had a problem writing at length before—whether for a class, my own personal writing endeavors, or for something as innocuous as a journal entry (though I would hardly call my journals from my high school years innocuous…embarrassing is more like it). In fact, writing too much at length is generally my problem. Whether or not I actually have any idea what I’m going to write about. This has frustrated me and I have pinned it down to the reason that I could never discipline myself well enough to actually complete anything of any merit that was not already an assignment or some other construct with strict guidelines that I must meet.

I’ve written before about my need for an endpoint in all things that I voluntarily take on. The problem with creative writing, however, is that the endpoint can hardly be arbitrary and the possibilities for setting one are virtually limitless. I once had what I thought was a great idea for a writing project—not one that was to be of any seriousness or real literary mettle, but just something silly that would at least result in a completed story of sorts. (Spoiler alert: I fail in the end…but I learn something!) Walking downtown one day through a particularly touristy section of New York, I happened across a souvenir stand that was selling really cheesy looking postcards—worse than usual, even. Luckily, for such poor quality, you didn’t have to pay much and on a whim, with the beginnings of my plan in mind, I bought 30 postcards for a mere dollar.

What was my BRILLIANT plan? I was going to send one postcard every day—or every other day at least—and on each postcard would be an installment of a story. The postcards would be numbered in sequence and I would have exactly the space provided on a standard card for each missive. Surely this would be an amazing thing! I eagerly started in on my story, filling up three postcards without stopping…or even thinking of where I would eventually want my little fairy tale to go in terms of inevitable conclusion. I only had 30 cards on which to do this and getting more would feel a little bit like cheating. No matter, I mailed off the first three on consecutive days to some (very dear) friends all the way across the ocean.

Caught up in the excitement, I was over 20 cards in before I realized that I was still in what I thought to be the introduction to my story. This was disastrous! Even though I continued to write about my doomed princess in the notebook I had recorded each card in for my own sake, I knew that I had once again failed to edit myself properly, had not done what should have been so simple and laid out at least the most basic of plans for what should happen. This is, I say again, a constant problem of mine. I get excited by an idea, start in on it full steam, and realize too late that in neglecting an outline or forethought into consequences, I have reached yet another dead end in my writing.

While writing a lot may not always be a problem, writing too much too soon without proper planning seems to be a prevalent one. Does it make sense to structure your work so rigidly? Does this block any real creative flow, or is some sort of guide necessary in order for any work of fiction to really happen? Just writing is always my go-to method, but clearly, it doesn’t always quite work. How do you resolve these issues?

(P.S. My friends, I think, liked the incomplete, introduction-heavy story anyhow.)

November 23, 2010   DG&B   fun, holidays, Stephanie, Thanksgiving, word count, writing  
2

Thanksgiving’s here, I can smell it

by Stephanie
It’s Tuesday! Which means it’s almost Wednesday! Which means it’s almost time for one of my favorite holidays of the year! Needless to say, I’m a little excited for this work week to pass. So as I count the hours (seconds?) to Thursday, I wanted to pass along this great post from Rachelle Gardner’s blog, Rants & Ramblings, about the all-important holiday plan for all you writers out there.  With extra time off but more holiday-related obligations, budgeting out time for writing will be more important than ever. As we approach these next few days off, I’m sure many of you have some kind of goal mapped out for that work-in-progress, but if not, this post offers great tips. First of all, I appreciate Rachelle’s realistic expectations in budgeting time: “try to accurately assess about how much time you’ll have for your personal writing pursuits.  Then, divide that time in half.” She gets it! She also takes into account the possible obstacles that may impede writing, and the importance of anticipating how they could potentially affect those word counts.
So what are your writing plans for the holiday break? Are deadlines looming? Looking to finish that new novel? Or start one, perhaps?  Either way, now that I’m in holiday mode, I hope you, dear readers, have a restful and productive holiday!
July 06, 2010   DG&B   advice, Chasya, From the Vault, opinion, word count  
1

From the Vault: Going long

Happy summer, everybody!  For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging.  It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when.  So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year.  We’ve cued up enough, but if you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!

by Chasya

We really enjoy reading the responses we get to our blog posts and finding out what our readers have to say about our ruminations and rambling on everything from book cover design to the state of the current market. These comments can also be excellent jumping-off points or topics that might be of interest the rest of our readers.

For instance, a couple of weeks ago, Miriam waxed romantic about the lack of sweeping, escapist fare in today’s book market; books that would allow us to get our collective minds off an awful economy and other goings-on in the world.

One of our readers responded, making the point that in today’s market a novel the length of Gone with the Wind or The Thorn Birds would get rejected immediately for being too long. The truth is we do consider submissions of various lengths including those that have a heftier word count, because, at the end of the day, a compelling novel is a compelling novel. Witness the most buzzed about debut this fall, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. At upwards of 560 pages, this doorstop of a book surpasses your average page count. Despite that, it has been an enormous success, and as Stacey pointed out last week, it was a bestseller way before Oprah got her hands on it. People were moved by the story and bought the book in droves. Another example that instantly comes to mind is Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, a 624 page tome which came out last year and shot up the bestseller lists. Our own Jacqueline Carey’s first novel Kushiel’s Dart comes in at 695 pages. Her most recent book in the series, Kushiel’s Mercy, is no slouch at 650 pages.

We absolutely crave the sorts of stories that grab hold of us whether they take 250 or 500 pages to tell. We would be remiss in tossing something aside simply because of its length. One of my own personal favorite books, Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True comes in at a staggering 928 pages. I’ve read this one a few times and still get that sad feeling as I near the end.

Along similar lines, another reader pointed out an interesting practice – mock submissions, in which cheeky authors take the first ten pages of a classic and send it off to an agent and then wait for their form rejection to come in the mail. The implication here is that a) agents are idiots who often don’t know that what they are looking at is a classic piece of literature and b) agents wouldn’t know a good piece of fiction even if it was staring them in the face.

We aren’t going to lie. A couple of years ago one of our agents rejected Moby Dick (yup, you heard me). The agent admitted this to me freely. Thing about that is, this agent also pointed out that he hated Melville and absolutely loathed Moby Dick. So, just because the book is a classic, does not mean we are going to change our minds about liking it or not. And just because a form rejection comes in the mail, doesn’t necessarily mean that the agent does not know what is being rejected. Often the agent does recognize the work and sees it for what it is, a prank, and sends a form rejection as a courtesy response.

Yes, ultimately agents are business people. We have to take on what we think will sell, and something that sold in 1851 probably isn’t going to top the charts in 2008. Let’s face it, the whaling industry is not really booming in this day and age, and one must take into consideration that classics are born of a specific age and place. In order to be successful, we do need to address what contemporary readers want to read. And perhaps if we’re very, very lucky, we can have the opportunity to represent a modern day classic.

Originally posted in November 2008.

March 11, 2010   DG&B   advice, Jessica, queries, slush week, word count  
7

Too much information?

by Jessica

Reader Laura A. posted the following response to Jim’s slush week round-up:

There were a lot of places where the agents seemed to want more information, and yet we’re always advised to keep queries brief. I’ve also read that agents don’t want you to give too much away – just give them enough information to want to keep reading. I realize it’s a fine line to walk. Perhaps if you do this again, you could address those types of questions regarding length and how much of the plot-line you should include.”

Laura A. makes a good point, and at Jim’s suggestion, I’m happy to address the “Be brief/Not enough information” conundrum. First of all, while I cannot speak for all agents, I have no inherent objections to long-ish query letters. In fact, I just received a terrific pitch letter for a novel in the vein of Donna Tartt’s Secret History. It stretches, beautifully and unabashedly, over the better part of two pages, and I read every word. And just as soon as I finish this blog entry, I will request the manuscript.

On the other hand, I sometime receive queries that are just a few lines long:

Dear Ms. Papin,

I am looking for an agent to represent a work of literary fiction, a coming-of-age story of a young woman who overcomes abject poverty to succeed—both against all odds and on her own terms. Kindly let me know if I may send you my manuscript.

This letter is correct. It is certainly concise. It is also devoid of any detail that might pique my interest. A pitch letter is a space to showcase your talents, and you are well served to take advantage of it. Give yourself some room to maneuver (or enough rope to hang yourself, as the case may be) find an elegant summation of your story, deploy an original turn of phrase. Don’t hide your light under a bushel.

As for the nitty gritty: take a page from journalism 101 and be certain to establish the who, what, when, where, why and how of your story. In prose as clean and effective as you can make it, give me the set up. Lay out the setting, characters, primary conflict, and give me a sense of the pace and the tone. Is the ending a surprise twist? Thereafter, turn your attention to the two additional “w’s” of book publishing, namely: the “who cares?” and the “why you?” Establish your readership—will your novel appeal to fans of Carl Hiassen or Jodi Picoult, Chang Rae Lee or Dennis Lehane? If you are writing non- fiction, who is your target market? Why are you uniquely suited to write the work at hand?

Resist the impulse to describe the book in its entirety. Few things are harder to write than an interesting synopsis—indeed, I’ve read grant proposals that are more compelling. You’re describing events, not the mood or the logic of the story, and asking your reader to accompany characters whom they don’t yet care about on adventures they don’t entirely understand can be deadly.

I tend to agree with Jim that modeling a query letter on flap or back cover copy is a helpful exercise. Jacket copy, like a query, is a selling tool, one that aims to capture the interest of its reader. Flap copy may be written by an in-house copy department or the book’s acquiring editor, in either event, it’s instructive to note the plot points a house chooses to include and those they decide to omit, as well as general the approach they take to selling a given project.

That’s not to say that flap copy is the gold standard. Once you start reading enough of it, you’ll come to spot stock phrases (“Tour de force” is a good example.) Leave these out. Ditto showy phrases that convey little actual meaning—“a story as luminous as it is unforgettable.” In fact, scrubbing your letter of clichés, literary or otherwise, is probably a good idea. And above all, be interesting. Banal is as damning as badly written.

And then bear in mind that even if you do craft a great letter, sometimes it’s the subject—and indeed, the necessary subjectivity of this business–that’s the problem. For example, while I am interested in the history of religion, I don’t represent Christian-themed books. Nor am I the agent to represent any one of the dozens of rebuttals to Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that I have been pitched. I also like to believe I have a sense of humor, but apparently my taste in fiction runs to the mostly humorless. Madcap and zany are not my cup of tea. So even a well-tuned pitch for a quirky caper novel is unlikely to win me over—though I’ll never say never. In the service of excellent writing, I’m happy to be wrong.

November 24, 2009   DG&B   Chasya, Chasya's Questions Corner, queries, submissions, word count  
0

Chasya’s Questions Corner: On Word Count

by Chasya

Question:

Does your agency set a limit on how long a work of fiction should be? Does it make a difference whether it’s science fiction or historical fiction?

Answer:

The short answer to this is no, there’s no limit. The number of pages it takes to tell your story is the number of pages the manuscript should be. In fact, a while back I did a blog post on this very question, and to paraphrase myself, which is kind of a weird thing to do but I’m going to do it anyway, what we’re looking for is material that we fall in love with, and that’s a pretty intangible thing that wouldn’t be limited by the length of a manuscript. That said, it’s also important to know your genre as well. Most commercial fiction runs between 80-100K, whereas epic fantasy, for instance, is 250K. I’m not going to lie, if you send in a query for your hard-boiled mystery and tell us your manuscript is 250,000 words, we will be taken aback since it’s unusual for us to see a word length that high for that type of manuscript. But at the end of the day, if the word count is higher than average and we like the query, we won’t balk at the length.

Please continue to send us questions at news@dystel.com!