What it comes down to, I’m afraid, is that readers of best sellers — which is to say the majority of readers in this country — prefer long books. This is their right, certainly, and it is only sensible for the writer who wants to sell to this best seller audience to provide them with what they’re looking for.
It almost seems to be true that there’s no such thing as a book that’s too long to be commercially viable. For years publishers resisted overlong first novels, saying that higher production costs made such books even more unprofitable than trimmer first novels. Nowadays the trend is in the other direction. If a first novel is sufficiently substantial — and of course if it satisfies other commercial considerations as well — then it can be promoted and ballyhooed and even sold.
James Clavell’s novel Shogun had a long run as a best seller a couple of years back. While it was an engrossing reading experience for me all the way through, I could not avoid applying to it Dr. Johnson’s observation regarding Paradise Lost — i.e., no one ever wished it were longer. For all its 1,400 pages, and for all that more readers started it than finished it, the book was a literary and commercial success. Not too many years ago a publisher might have hesitated to bring out quite so long a novel, especially one set in medieval Japan. Clavell’s track record helped, certainly, but equally helpful I suspect was the growing recognition that great length helps more books than it hinders.
Does this mean you should aim from the beginning at long books?
No, not necessarily. It may mean that you shouldn’t try to hit the best seller list with a short book, any more than you should try to peddle a quarter of a million words as a paperback.
But your first object, remember, is to write your own kind of book. You’ll learn, from your own reading and as you begin writing, what sort of book suits you best. I’ve come to see that I myself am most comfortable writing relatively lean, spare volumes. This no doubt limits my potential from a commercial standpoint, but I’d be limiting myself rather more severely were I to force myself to write books that suited me less for purely commercial motives.
That said, it’s worth noting that a great many writers find themselves producing longer books as time goes by. This does not mean that they are attempting to respond to the dictates of the marketplace. While that may be a factor, it’s at least as likely that this extension of their range has simply come about naturally. An intimidating length becomes less intimidating after one has written a batch of short novels.
I could go on. But this chapter, like Abraham Lincoln’s legs, is plenty long enough as it is.
And that’s the long and short of it.
Chapter 13
Rewriting
All at once or as you go along? Structural revision. Stylistic polishing. How rewriting sharpens prose
I rewrite constantly. For every page that gets printed there must be five that go into the wastebasket. One of the hardest aspects of writing is accepting this squandering of labor, but it is essential. I doubt if there is one page in a thousand, throughout the whole of literature, that wouldn’t have been improved by the author’s redoing it.
Professional writers vary considerably in their approach to rewriting. Some would endorse the observation quoted above while others would dismiss it as nonsense. Some regard rewriting as the genuinely enjoyable side of their occupation, the stage in which one sees the book taking its final form. Others hate rewriting but do it anyway. Some do one complete draft after another until the book satisfies them. Others polish each page before moving on to the next one. Some write five or more drafts of a book before they feel they’ve got it right. Others submit their first drafts.
I don’t believe there’s any right or wrong way to approach rewriting, not with so many pros having so much success with so many widely divergent methods. As with so many aspects of writing, each writer must determine what works best in his own particular case — what method produces the best work and makes him most comfortable.
I myself have always been the sort of writer who loathes revision. Looking back over the years, I can see a couple of factors which tend to explain this attitude. I was always more concerned with the accomplishment than the act; I was interested less in writing, you might say, than in having written. Once I finished writing a short story or a novel I wanted to consider myself done with it for all time. Indeed, the minute I typed “The End” I wanted to be able to take a deep breath, walk around the corner, and see my work in print at the newsstand. The last thing I desired at such a moment was to sit down, take an even deeper breath, and commence feeding the whole thing through the typewriter a second time.
Because I was a naturally smooth stylist, as I mentioned a couple of chapters back, I could get away with submitting first drafts. They didn’t look rough. And, because I had a sort of fictive tunnel vision, I was unlikely to see more than one way that a book could be written.
When I was writing the soft-core sex novels, economic considerations largely ruled out rewriting. Who could afford it? Who had time for it? When you’re turning out somewhere between twelve and twenty books a year, you may cheerfully agree with Greenan’s point and still never rewrite a line. So what if every last one of your pages could be improved by making another trip through your typewriter? There’s no time to polish each page to perfection, and no incentive, either. The readers won’t notice the difference. The publisher probably won’t notice either, and wouldn’t care if he did.
There’s even an argument against revision, and it may have applied to those early sex novels. Jack Kerouac advanced it when he spoke of his writing as “spontaneous bop prosody,” equating his manner of composition to a jazz musician’s creative improvisation. More cynically, the lead character in Barry N. Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, a hack science-fiction writer enormously contemptuous of his own work, argues that rewriting would rob his crap of the only thing it has going for it, its freshness. Once you start rewriting, Herovit holds, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. All you wind up doing is what William Goldman, discussing the agony of rewriting an inadequate play prior to its opening, called “washing garbage.”
I never washed my garbage in those days. Thinking back, I’m astonished at the sangfroid with which I presumed to forego revision altogether. I scarcely ever retyped a page.
There was one time I well remember when, checking the pages at the end of the day’s work, I discovered that I’d written pages 31 through 45 but had somehow jumped in my page numbering from 38 to 40. Rather than renumber the pages, I simply sat down and wrote page 39 to fit. Since page 38 ended in the middle of a sentence, a sentence which then resumed on page 40, it took a little fancy footwork to slide page 39 in there, but the brash self-assurance of youth was evidently up to that sort of challenge.
Jacqueline Susann used to tell talk show audiences how she rewrote every book four or five times, using yellow paper for one draft, green for a second, pink for a third, blue for a fourth, and finally producing finished copy on white bond. I don’t seem to recall the point of this rainbow approach to revision, nor am I sure I believe Susann actually did this; anyone as accomplished as she at self-promotion might well have been capable of embroidery.