A piece in the Observer today that urges writers to slim down:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/19/novels-size-robert-mccrum

Not sure he makes his point as well as he might, and I haven't read the new fatties he mentions so can't comment on their quality, but I must admit I'm a short novel fan, too.

Hi

(This is my very first post, so please be gentle)

I'm currently working on my first novel, or what I hope will be my first, and decided early on that I wanted a slim novel. As slim as a publisher will allow.

I have, however, come to understand that the question is not that simple. The size of the novel, slimness, must correspond with the level of detail. And the level of detail must correspond with the characters personality. You can't write a first person narrative about an anal-retentive man in 100 pages.

I want my novel to be short because I want it to read like an obituary. That is to say that I want it to scurry along, paying to mind to however great the events are. I want the characters to be very briefly described. The reason is that this way it allows the, creative, reader to project, or superimpose, their own selves on the characters. I.e. tricking them into making assumptions about the characters by a sort of slight of hand.

My all time favourite novel, and forgive me if I appear as a philistine, is The Graduate. In that novel Charles Webb manages what Hemingway never did. To cut down the novel to its bones, its core, and never be self-indulgent or make the reader skip a paragraph.

To me the most wonderful novels are the slim ones, as long as it fits the story, that dont dwell or linger, but are always moving and allowing room for interpretation and breathing space.

I often feel that authors who write long novels are cowards, always making sure not one jot is misinterpreted. Great literature knows that little is needed to set the scene, show the background, or describe a character.

Am I wrong?


Anr.

I often feel that authors who write long novels are cowards, always making sure not one jot is misinterpreted.

I'd say this is a rather scary generalisation. Length surely depends upon (a) how much one has to say and (b) how much of that is going to be appreciated by the reader!

Personally, I rather like longer novels, but not to the exclusion of short ones.

I'd say the only valid generalisation about length or any other aspect of a novel should be: 'What's right is what works'.

Welcome to the site and good luck with the first novel.

Chris

Interesting piece - thanks for that, Jan. Though who says "everyone loves" A Christmas Carol? I certainly don't. And although The Turn of the Screw is indeed a masterpiece (if you don't mind your masterpieces flawed and equivocal) it's just a completely different project from, say, Portrait of a Lady, which is also a truly great book.

I know fat books with very little going on in them - grossly overwritten, or just boringly written and overstuffed with plot, and fat books which are immensely rich, with every word evoking a further three that aren't on the page. And if every word of a 130,000 word novel evokes a further three... you have something like Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which is a sizeable masterpiece. Rose Tremain's Music and Silence is pretty substantial, but neither of them could be any shorter and still be the brilliant books they are.

I'm a Carver (Lished) and Hemingway fan, but I teach many writers who hope their writing is spare, and in fact all it is is impoverished. Pared down and short can be cowardly too, and lazy: a refusal by the writer to do the work s/he should be doing. It can also be quite as mannered in its self-consciousness, vide Hemingway at his worst. Less is not always more: quite often it's less.

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Also, the discussion gets confused between lots of words to say one thing - which may be wonderfully written, or just over-written - and a long book, which may be written in very spare prose. My prose is pretty economical in how many words it takes to evoke/state/explain/narrate something, but I write quite long novels.

I'm not sure which that McCrum piece is talking about - he doesn't make that distinction.

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Meant to say, I blogged about this question of spare/impoverished versus rich/purple here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2010/07/lots-of-them.html

I see I was rather cross at the time...

One of the students I interviewed the other day actually mentioned the article and asked about this at the end: did we encourage our students to write longer or shorter novels? I said no we didn't!

I'm sure you're all right, it does depend how it's handled, whether the book is long or short. I think I was holding in my head my fairly recent re-reading of 'Sophie's Choice', which, fab book though I still think it is, would have benefitted greatly from a firmer editorial hand. IMO, it could easily lose the first couple of chapters where he just waffles on about coming to New York and his job, all of which is totally irrelevant to the story. I think the reading of long novels that have a lot of padding has eroded my trust of longer novels, somewhat unfairly, perhaps.