I’m reading the draft of a friend’s novel right now which is notable for two things: 1) excellent writing, and 2) length. I mean, this guy rarely writes short, but he’s outdone himself this time. Worst thing is that because of point 1) up there, I’ll probably have to read the whole damn thing. It’s a lot easier to skim bad writing.
Thinking about it, and discussing the issue with my wife, led me to wonder about a story’s “natural” length and whether such a thing exists. There’s no question that some subjects like war and politics, or generational sagas, just seem to demand longer works because to really get the feel for such sweeping topics, you need to see a lot of sides of them and feel like you’re inside the bigness.
But simpler stories may also demand length because the complexity of the plot or characters, to be fully understood, just takes a lot of elucidating.
Anyway, I’m not really commenting on whether longer is good or bad (though in today’s electronic market, I’d argue the trend is towards shorter works). Mostly I’m just noodling with the idea and considerations because they interest me, which is the first sign they might make a good story somehow.
Consider, my protagonist (who’s nothing like my friend) has an editor who loves his work, but wants him to write her novel idea #2 that he pitched to her. That one she’s sure she can take to her editorial board. So after years of struggling for recognition (and ignoring the obvious step of self-publishing writers can follow today), our guy, who we’ll call Bobby, sits down with idea #2 and begins. For the sake of the story, we’ll say it’s a standard thriller idea – say, the real person behind the Oklahoma City bombings and maybe even 9/11 was never correctly identified, and now he’s planned his most heinous attack yet – the triggering of a nuclear warhead in an unidentified major city of the US.
Bobby chose this idea because he’s done loads of research on nuclear explosives and thinks he can pull off the technical stuff. But as he writes, he gets caught up in the politics of the FBI who’ve been alerted. Then by the personal lives of the White House staff who get involved. Then Bobby feels the story doesn’t have enough umph and decides it has to be multiple nuclear bombs in five different US cities. Which of course necessitates researching and writing about the response teams for each of the cities as they become aware of the threat. And all of their families must be brought to life so we get the emotional impact. And he should probably add some backstory on the evil mastermind, which will involve the terrorist’s political upbringing, probably foreign, and that country’s politics and social structure and belief systems. Which raises the whole faith issue and demands Bobby add a character from the clergy and maybe some other religious stream, like shamanism.
And so it goes, spinning out into more and more silliness, until Bobby is trying to write the entire country, indeed the entire world, because this is his BIG CHANCE, and he has things to say.
Probably throw in a girlfriend who gets emotionally abandoned during this process, or maybe a wife and kids. Probably make it extreme, so that as his manuscript approaches a thousand pages with no end in sight, he’s going truly off the deep end.
Final kicker might be someone who comes out with a book on the same subject in the meantime that’s standard length and hailed as a masterpiece.
Ah, the cruelties of the creative mind!
Have you ever watched “Wonderboys”? It’s about exactly that disease. I think that a story does have a length and a balance. I have tried to write short stories a number of times and, with only a few particularly sad exceptions, they have all turned into novels by the end of the first few thousand words. I think there is a scale of story. When the scale is ignored, when the author runs amuck, you get the quarter-million word novels proving the point that many authors need a really good editor (to cut out the crap, repeats, and sloggy bits that slow down the story). There are notable exceptions, Sanderson’s “The Way of Kings” for example, but many of them have lost story and become about how many words. That is when story hasn’t found it’s size. There is a tension, a pacing, a boundary. Are nukes in 5 cities more harrowing than 1 city, 1 well established and understood city? By the way, you should write that one. The concept of a hobbyist terrorist unknown mastermind is chilling.
Yeah, Matt, I did watch “Wonderboys” quite a few years back. I don’t remember story length being the Douglas character’s problem so much as fear of not living up to expectations, but, as I say, it was quite awhile back that I saw it.
And I agree that different stories have different natural scales. You obviously think in novel-length stories. Some people think in epic length. In the shorty story I was contemplating, the character thought in global-all-encompassing length. I thought it was kind of funny.
And me write a thriller about a terrorist planting nukes in a city. Nah, not unless I came up with a really cool twist on it. Too much research for something that’s been done a lot.
But be my guest to take the idea and run with it.