When I finished the first draft of A Bit of Sun, my first novel, it comprised 234,000 words.
“Oh, Ann,” you are thinking, “haven’t you ever heard of ‘less is more’?”
Well, yes, I have, and I knew I had to revise and reduce my manuscript, which I did. When London literary agent Tessa Sayle agreed to take it on and send it out to publishers in England, I had already reduced it to a mere 215,000 words.
Groan. (You.)
Well, Tess was unable to place the book with a publisher, and when she came to visit me, she advised me to cut it “by half.”
Groan. (Me.)
I did try, honestly I did, but it seemed that whenever I decided I could toss out a particular chapter or scene that was not integral to the plot, one of my readers (or Tess herself) would say, “Oh, no, you can’t get rid of that chapter!” or (in the case of Tess), “Oh, dear. That was my favorite scene.” I did manage to tighten the work to a slightly more manageable 168,000 words, but needless to say, “that” chapter (also one of my favorites) and “that” scene (not really one of my favorites) were still both included at printing time.
What is a writer to do? Yank out all the best parts of the work, leaving only the bare plotline, as they do on late-night movie channels to leave more room for advertising? Would you really want Conroy’s The Prince of Tides to be reduced by half? I still remember how indignant one of my friends was that the grandfather’s water-skiing adventure, which had nothing to do with the main plot, had been removed from the movie version of that most engaging book. That particular adventure was not even one of my favorite stories in the novel, but there were others equally unnecessary to the plot that I would have hated to miss.
Of course, Pat Conroy was already a well-established author by the time The Prince of Tides was released. If you are an unpublished author trying to get published by a traditional publisher, it would be in your favor for the length of your novel to fall within book publishers’ word-length parameters, which are getting shorter all the time. But unless you can write like Gregory McDonald, whose novel Fletch provides an excellent example of lean writing that still gives great characterization while never straying from moving the plot forward, you may want to think twice about cutting the very scenes that build characterization, reveal motivation, and evoke emotion in your reader. These scenes are often the ones that make a novel “work.” Without them, you may be left with too shallow a story to hold your readers’ interest.
© 2016 / 2019 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.
Photo: Samoan Musketeers © 2010 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.