This is a good discussion. Basically, if you want to get published by a traditional publisher these days (and aren't writing epic fantasy) you'd best stick to the 100,000 word limit for your stories. This isn't conjecture. Read any agent or publishing house 'rules' and you'll discover this is true. I also agree that many writers (like me) over-write first drafts, and their books are flabby and need tight editing. However, cutting away 'flab,' doesn't always result in a 100,000 word novel. In many cases you'd need to cut away muscle and bone as well, to achieve that goal. It all boils down to your story, your pacing, your desire to immerse the reader in a created world, what kind of timespan your story encompasses, etc. It has nothing to do with quality. As @EdFromNY pointed out, sometimes you need to add in material during the editing to perfect your story. This increases your word count, but also your quality. I'd say if your goal as a writer is getting taken on by a traditional publisher, by all means, stick to the rules with your first book. Write a short one. If your goal is to produce the best possible story, I'd say work on doing that (including heavy pruning if that's what's needed) and forget about word count. Thankfully there are other options out there for those of us who like (and write) long books. I don't argue with the publisher's right to do what they like, and to avoid the risk of taking on an unknown author with a long book and increasing their publication costs. However, I stoutly maintain this has NOTHING to do with the quality of the book. It bothers me that short length and quality are now being equated, even by some members of this forum on this thread. It costs a lot more to stage a symphony in a great hall than it does to stage a concert in a small venue with a 5-piece band with electric/electronic instruments. But that doesn't make the small band better than the symphony orchestra. Just cheaper. They might be a very good, but they might not. They aren't better simply because they're smaller. I would hate to see one kind of music erase the other, just because of cost.
I'm not sure about Beethoven's audience, but certainly Mozart and Bach were writing FOR somebody, and they were providing an experience that was written to keep the customer satisfied. Fortunately, the commercial jingle was only a gleam in the eye of the rising (and not yet dominant) merchant classes, and it was the old aristocracy and the church who were paying for music to be written.
I can remember my brother (an accountant) argue that The Beatles were better musicians than Beethoven because they'd made more money...
Well, yes, and I don't have the quotes at my fingertips here, but I wonder if the church and or the rulers who paid these musicians stipulated that they had to write short fast pieces, with as few notes as possible, in order to save money? I don't want to run away too far with the music analogy, but my point is: length has nothing to do with quality. From a publisher's point of view, they make less money from a single book that's 200,000 words long than they do from two books of 100,000 each. Same number of words for a reader to plough through, though.... Do you want to read a long story that takes you away to another world and keeps you there for a while? Or do you prefer to read stories that take you away to another world for a short time? That preference is down to the reader. There is nothing inherently wrong with either preference.
Absolutely not, it was all about prestige..."My tame genius will write a more impressive (and if quality is equal, quantity wins) piece of music than yours." Straining this musical analogy, Wagner was famously "verbose", and what he was writing was, basically, fantasy...so, even then, fantasy blockbusters were the norm!
To mix analogies p), there are miniaturists and there are muralists. In music, guys like Paul McCartney are miniaturists - masters of the three-minute pop song. Pete Townshend of The Who is a muralist - big concept albums like Tommy and Quadrophenia. He can't really express himself in a smaller form. Wagner, obviously, was a muralist. Anyone writing opera was a muralist. It's not that one is better than the other; it's that different artists find that certain forms are more appropriate for what they want to communicate. In literature, there have been many of both. Two of my favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, were miniaturists - masters of short stories and novellas. But I also love those who work in larger forms. Where would literature be without Tolkien, Proust, Thomas Mann, Thomas Pynchon, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, etc.? Muralists all. I agree strongly with @jannert. Length does not equate to quality. Publishers need to make a buck, and it's an easier buck with a smaller book, so they want word limits. But look at what we lose if we commit to snack-size novels: no War and Peace, no Moby Dick, no Ulysses, no Gravity's Rainbow. No Thomas Wolfe, no major Dostoyesvsky. There has to be room for the big book. There has to be room for the book a reader can disappear into for a month. I hate the idea of word limits.
There is a scene in "Amadeus" in which the emperor criticizes one of Mozart's operas as having "too many notes". "Just cut a few," the emperor says, "and it will be perfect." Mozart replies, "Which few did you have in mind, your majesty? There are just as many notes as I require - neither more nor less." To get to @jannert's point, the issue is not a presumption that brevity=quality. It's that one never knows whether a first novel will sell, and long first novels that don't sell hurt the bottom line more than short first novels that don't sell. It is simply applying corporate notions of risk management to publishing. It's also important to remember that, like other "rules" about writing, this one is not absolute. Genre is a variable - fantasy has been mentioned, and I would add that historicals also have some leeway. I think it was @TWErvin2 who, in a similar thread not long ago, pointed out that word count limits are guidelines; it is possible to have a first novel traditionally published at more than 100K words, but the odds of success diminish as the word count grows. I would add that it would likely take some other factor - one that would change the publisher's perception of the likelihood of success - to gain consideration for a manuscript that was markedly larger than 100K. Someone mentioned Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian (which I would argue is most definitely not fantasy, whatever else it might be), but remember that she won the Hopwood Award for Best Novel In Progress two years before it was published. That was certainly a factor in Little, Brown & Co. deciding to splash out $2 mil to publish a first time novel. And, their investment paid off, because Kostova made it to #1 on the NY Times bestseller list the first week of publication.
it is really down to you as to what you write, if you can and prefer writing shorter books/stories/novels (chose your preferred word) then go ahead! i know from a personal perspective, i can easily write novels over 50k words time and again, without much thought, but then no doubt ill need to edit like mad to get them right (don't we all?)
@EdFromNY what would you call The Historian? Given the supernatural elements, "fantasy" seems to fit.
Unless you are in a really specialized audience and you have a name already, some lucky first time novelists I've seen, especially one popular here in the UK called something like Kate Muro or something like that, has made quite the name for herself on a debut novel 500 pages long. But she is the exception of the exception really. Be careful, that's all I can say.
Kostova melds aspects of the historical Vlad Tepis with the fictional Dracula, with the emphasis clearly on the historical Tepis. The story unfolds as historical research as well as a coming-of-age tale. It's been classified as a gothic novel, postmodern historical, epistolary epic, historical thriller and adventure novel. Any of those would do for me.
Genres are pretty fluid. I don't mind any of the above that don't purport that it is a historical novel, but I don't think they preclude fantasy. In other words, you can have an adventure novel or episotlary epic that is also a fantasy (in fact, I can think of at least one modern example of the latter).
I don't think that you can say by any measure that it is primarily a fantasy, any more than you can say that her second novel, The Swan Thieves, is a historical.
@EdFromNY that's probably true. I find genre definitions to be fascinating, so it is a topic I like to discuss. The novel I said I could reference, above, is Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull. It is an epistolary novel, consisting of letters written between the primary characters. It is set in England in 1849, and the authors did a lot of historical research for it. The novel deals with the politics of the day, as well as the philosophies of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and others (in fact, Engels appears in the novel). All of this is as a backdrop to a mystery and adventure story. The book doesn't have overt supernatural elements, as I recall, though it does delve into some of the occult and mysticism that was popular in England at the time. Interestingly, Freedom and Necessity is most often shelved in fantasy, though I have seen it shelved in general literature. Both Bull and Brust are well-known and successful fantasy writers (Brust more so than Bull, I think). It may be that the publishers labeled it "fantasy" simply because they knew that by being on the fantasy shelves those names would be immediately recognized by a great number of readers (the reason I bought the book when it came out is because I knew both Brust and Bull's works and I liked them). From the business side of things, I think genre-labeling is more of a marketing decision than anything. From a more "definitional" side of things, where you're looking more at what themes or elements should dictate in terms of genre, it becomes a lot more fuzzy. Freedom and Necessity is often shelved in fantasy, while The Historian is not, but in terms of being primarily a fantasy, based on fantastic elements in the novels themselves, I'm not sure they're that far apart.
I'm not familiar with Freedom and Necessity, but it sounds very interesting. And, from your description, I would agree that it doesn't sound very different, in terms of fantasy, from The Historian. I think we need to keep in mind that genre - whether in music or literature - is only a marketing tool. Born in the context of brick-and-mortar bookstores and record stores (pause for nostalgic sigh), genre simply served to let the consumer know where (s)he could go to quickly find the kind of music or story (s)he was looking for (and serves that function even now on Amazon and other web sites). Most likely, since Bull and Brust were writers with an established readership within the fantasy genre, bookstores shelved Freedom and Necessity as fantasy to most readily reach that readership.
I'm sure, too, that longer books were more acceptable in the past because of a sheer lack of other entertainment. Back in the days before computers, tv, and radio what else could you do for fun but read, tell stories, or play music? Even something like the theatre was relatively rare years ago. Small towns had to wait for traveling groups to come through and when they did it was remembered for years. Books published nowadays have to compete with other activities that both cater to and help create shorter and shorter attention spans. Also, there's less leisure time with people working around the clock and juggling more activities simultaneously than they once did. Life has gotten faster and entertainment is faster as well. I'm not saying this is good, of course. I agree that quality should come before quantity, and I also object to the idea that paper books will be replaced with computers eventually. It may happen in a hundred years, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.
I think that's probably correct, that people have short attention spans these days. However, my question is ...what difference does it make if you spend as much time reading one book as it would take you to read two? The amount of time you spend and the number of words you read are exactly the same. People have no trouble watching series TV—in fact, series TV is incredibly popular. People get hooked on Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, etc. (Only one of these is fantasy.) A long book is like series TV. Just put it down when you need to go do something else, and pick it up when you're back in reading mode again. There is no need to pick up a brand new book every time you're in reading mode. This is my point. People are being herded into the notion that a long book is 'bad' for whatever reason—it's boring, it's difficult, it's full of flab, it takes too long to read, etc. When in fact, the 'short first book' trend is based on publishers' wish to spend as little money as possible promoting a book that might not be a success. Of course if it IS a success, the author is free to write long books after that. Length of book is NO measure of its quality. But yes, a short book takes less paper and ink. That's what it boils down to. Paper and ink. The same amount of paper and ink it would take to produce two books instead of one.
Yes ...sigh. You're right. I remember back in the day of 'paperbacks only,' when people would shrink from a book that was 'too thick.' I suppose that makes sense if you read only one book a year, and want the noxious experience to be as short as possible ...but you know what? Those are NOT the people I'm writing for!
Well, I'll write my story to the best of my ability. If it's 50k, great. 80k? Great. If it lowers my chances of being published, that's too bad. Everything in it will be necessary and will complete the story I am telling. Removing anything would wreck it. It's not about wanting it to be a brick, it's about creating my vision to the best of my ability. I suppose them's the breaks. Fight the battles that matter.
