> Oh, and use an editor (the human kind, not the digital kind.)
This is so important (IMNSHO). It's fairly obvious, that editors are becoming a "lost art."
My mother was a scientific editor, and she was brutal (she edited some of my work).
It's really hard to find fiction books, that are less than 500 pages.
I read a story about Stephen King. Apparently, he hates being edited (most writers don't like it).
When he was just starting out, he was forced into being edited. I remember reading 'Salem's Lot, back in the 1970s. It was an awesome book (Relatively short, succinct, scary as hell), and made me suddenly become a Stephen King fan.
As he got more and more famous, he started being able to bully his editors, to the point where his work is barely edited at all.
> It's really hard to find fiction books, that are less than 500 pages.
For SF & F this seems to be a deliberate choice, from what I understand. This is from an iterview with Ted Chiang:
TC: I think the reaction varies, because science fiction is a more commercial genre. There are a lot more people in science fiction whose goal is to make a living from writing fiction by publishing one or more novels a year. And people who enter science fiction generally receive more messaging about fiction writing as a sole source of income than, say, people entering mainstream fiction. The messaging there is different: get an MFA, teach; it’s understood that your teaching position supports your career as a writer. For writers entering science fiction, that’s not really a thing yet. We’re maybe getting there, but the messaging they receive is mostly: Be very prolific.
>> As [Stephen King] got more and more famous, he started being able to bully his editors, to the point where his work is barely edited at all.
Yeah, I kinda noticed that too. I picked up a book of his and couldn't finish it because it felt like every episode in the story was written so that it took maybe ten, maybe fifty more pages than it really needed to. Extreme padding.
I think Liu Cixin also went through something similar. The Dark Forest was lean and mean. The next two books were progressively fatter and more verbose and full of aimless meandering. Though maybe that was an attempt to complete a trilogy to capitalise on the first book, if I'm more cynical.
While I see where you’re coming from re: The Three Body Problem Vs the rest of the series, the core ideas in the Dark Forest and Deaths End are so exciting that I can’t help but feel the rest of the story is a justification for exploring them.
First drafts tend to be verbose. Poor editing contributes to that kind of prose slipping through into publication.
As to huge page counts, mysteries are similar to science fiction as genres but I don't see a push to expand to huge sizes.
All genres are places where earning a living is possible. Someone said if you have a popular mystery series, every public library will buy at least one hardback copy of each of your books.
If you are big time popular, they might order 20 copies, like the last few Sue Grafton books.
I think page padding is more a thing in self publishing. I'm part of a few fiction writer communities and longer (in general) makes more money. You are advised to start with short stories and graduate to novels as soon as possible. This is especially true for authors enrolling their books in Kindle Unlimited. They are paid per page read. The more pages they can have the reader go through without boring them enough to just quit, the more they get paid.
> Apparently, he hates being edited (most writers don't like it).
I've grown to love it. It was a long road. Once you start disciplined
writing an editor becomes like a personal trainer who helps you be
your best. Until I learned to write with more steel and less fire, ego
ruled my writing. The familiar sins are;
- loving the sound of your own (inner) voice
- showing off what you know rather than considering what the reader
might care to hear (and muddying waters so as to appear deep)
- pretentious talk (circumlocutory linguistic gymnastics)
A good editor gets to know your weaknesses and corrects them gently.
>A good editor gets to know your weaknesses and corrects them gently.
Or maybe not-so-"gently" .. I'll take useful constructive criticism (regardless of harshness) over unactionable "reword" every dang day of the week (and 3 times on Sunday)
You can see exactly the same with other authors. Asimov and J. K. Rowling, to pick two obvious candidates.
Compare "Foundation" with "Foundation and Earth" or "Foundation's Edge". Or "The Philosopher's Stone" with "The Order of the Phoenix". The former were well-edited and succinct. The latter were overly long, in some cases sorely repetitive with large amounts of padding, and a good editor could have cut them down by at least half without losing much.
Hey, thanks for that! Proper comma (and semicolon) usage is always a challenge for me.
I decided to develop the habit of the "Oxford Comma," but I don't think I have it down, yet. It also seems to be "un-American." American English does not like commas.
In the great short books category, Willa Cather’s plains trilogy books are like 150-200 pages each, they’re fast reads and the prose is excellent — I’d start with ‘O Pioneers!’
That's not just him, it seems to happen to a lot of authors when they get famous. They get more clout and can push back on the editors, or the editors become afraid to cut too much, and suddenly you have bricks where half the words could be removed.
I always like to point at Victor Hugo. In Les Misérables, apparently (I didn't count), more than a quarter of the text is essays which do not move the plot forward. The essay about Waterloo is the most egregious example.
Apparently that was a bit of the style at the time (one of them delves into the Paris sewer system) to kind of "show off". Some other contemporary works are clearly written to be serialized.
Once downloaded a copy of Hound of the Baskervilles, broken into chapters as separate files. Each chapter was almost exactly the same length, within a few hundred characters, showing that it had been serialized first and chapters were sized for publication.
I'm trying to remember if it was Dumas, but some French author was reputedly paid by the word, so all their dialogue is incredibly drawn out ("I have a question." "What is the question?" "It is, as you might expect from me, a simple question." "By all means, please, present me with the question, that I may resolve your puzzlement." ... etc.).
That's one of the ongoing theories as to why Moby Dick was so long ... not merely to accentuate the 99.99% bordedom of whaling (with the 0.01% of "excitement"), but because he'd get paid better if it were longer
Having read the "Great Illustrated Classics" edition of Moby Dick as a kid, and watched the Gregory Peck film, I can confidently assert I NEVER want to read the whole thing.
Even those "condensed" versions had enormous swaths of nothing in them!
Many modern novels seem that way too. Not the elaborate dialog, but endless rambling descriptions.
Historical novels are often big offenders. Like the author has done a ton of research, not a bad thing, but can't bear to leave any of it out, and there is no editor to say that's too much, people don't need to know how big the potato patch at the Palace of Versailles was.
> It's really hard to find fiction books, that are less than 500 pages.
Allow me to introduce you to the myriad Maigret novels by George Simenon. :) They are my favorite filler books when I want something good at only 150-200 pages.
What I meant was that books like the Maigret novels probably wouldn't be published as free standing books, but packed into collections, say three or four of them together, to get closer to the magic 500 pages.
I will mention that I highly recommend Simenon's writing, Maigret series and others. He's a fine writer. The TV series with Michael Jambon is excellent. The Maigret stories are the right length to turn into an hour show without losing too much of the interesting details.
Of course, but remember that they were first published in 1931. The last ones were 1973 but by then they were so popular they could go against the already established trend of longer books.
Someone writing new mysteries today probably could not get a single book that short accepted by a publisher.
If you follow the publication of big name writers, there is a tendency for their later works to get longer and longer, and, as you say, harder to read.
Examples include Robert Heinlein in Science Fiction, James Michener in general fiction, Herman Wouk in general fiction. For Wouk, his well known Caine Mutiny is a fairly long book, but it's tightly written. Later works not so much.
I can only read his short fiction with few exceptions. He got to the point where he would take 50 pages (exaggeration, but still...) to describe, I dunno, a room. Okay, so the room is important, but is it that important?
I've never read King, but do recall the hilarity of Goldman's "The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The "Good Parts" Version" ""editorial' comments throughout ... like "with this and that, we move to chapter 4"
Eh, depends...as you point out it is becoming a "lost art".
The average quality of editors is utterly abysmal, so if you're pretty handy with style, or have lived under the cosh of an academic style guide for long enough you can probably get by without an editor.
>lived under the cosh of an academic style guide for long enough you can probably get by without an editor.
I'd say the opposite
As someone who's recently been put back under the "cosh of an academic style guide", I can definitely say the "academic style guide" does NOTHING to help with editing ... it's all about FORMAT
Format is nice, and all ... but almost 100% irrelevant to the content
Then it's a lost cause, you can't expect an editor to understand content, their function is to impose style, any reasonable exposure to formal language should be sufficient (but actually I disagree completely).
If major publications can't employ decent editors what hope have you?
This is so important (IMNSHO). It's fairly obvious, that editors are becoming a "lost art."
My mother was a scientific editor, and she was brutal (she edited some of my work).
It's really hard to find fiction books, that are less than 500 pages.
I read a story about Stephen King. Apparently, he hates being edited (most writers don't like it).
When he was just starting out, he was forced into being edited. I remember reading 'Salem's Lot, back in the 1970s. It was an awesome book (Relatively short, succinct, scary as hell), and made me suddenly become a Stephen King fan.
As he got more and more famous, he started being able to bully his editors, to the point where his work is barely edited at all.
And it shows.
I really can't read him, anymore.