My Legs Are Long Enough To Reach The Ground

July 13, 2010

Tom, if you're reading this, my apologies.

The husband of a friend of mine had read a couple of my books and was asking about The Fallen. In that I knew he was unemployed, I gave him an advanced reading copy I had laying around and more or less forgot about it. Then last night he emailed me his thoughts on the book, which overall were positive. But he threw in a few thoughts:

The first is it was not long enough, you could have really built on it with some more detail. I wish it had another 100 pages so it would be about as long as the other books of this type. The second comment is about the chapters. I did not like the huge number of them, and thought you could team up some of them and eliminate some of the extra chapters. I know some authors do all the good guy stuff in one, and divide it with a line, or a star, or something to show where the break in characters is.

I wrote back, "Thanks. Glad you enjoyed the book" and answered a question he had about the the next book. I felt no obligation to respond to his comments, all of which are fairly interesting. And if I had not spent some time thinking about these prior to actually writing the book, I probably wouldn't be much of a writer, but I'm not sure they're worth explaining to a reader and besides, there are probably no correct answers, only a matter of taste. But since, generally speaking, the readers of this blog are either novelists or aspiring novelists, I will share a few thoughts here.

1. The first is it was not long enough, you could have really built on it with some more detail. Perhaps. It's around 76,000 words. A genre novel typically goes between 70,000 and 100,000. The Derek Stillwater books could loosely fall into the category of "espionage" or "political thriller" and some of those books often do run upwards of 120,000 or more. And I'd have to check, but I think The Devil's Pitchfork and The Serpent's Kiss are both closer to 90,000 and although I'm not certain, the 4th one (due out June 2011), The Valley of Shadows, probably runs 95,000 or so. And if things continue the way they seem to be, the 5th book may run a few million words... just joking. Sometimes it feels like the book Grady Tripp in "The Wonder Boys" is writing, the one that's over a thousand pages long because he doesn't know how to end it ... or in my case, I keep thrashing around trying to figure out what the story actually is... don't worry, I'll find it.

Generally speaking, the reviewers and readers have been quite happy with the pace of The Fallen, and part of that pace--"blistering" as James Rollins called it--comes from the leanness of the writing. So it was intentional and it's part of how I write. That said, I think each progressive novel, hopefully, will be more detailed with more depth while still trying to hold onto a rollicking pace. There are a number of aspects of a fast-paced page-turner that relate to keeping the writing lean and efficient, but another important aspect has to do with what I think of as the incident-to-page ratio--that is to say, is there a lot going on, or are two people talking for pages on end while they travel on a bus, or do you spend pages on internal monologue and flashbacks. Although I'm still being cautious about internal monologue and flashbacks, I'm trying to get more depth into Derek's backstory and adding more layers to other characters in future books, hopefully without jettisoning the things that make a "Mark Terry Book."

Also, book length is always a puzzle. There are marketing concerns, and if you go too long, it costs the publisher more to produce it, and they may ask you to cut material out to fit the market, or, if you're not a bestseller, they may just say, "Yeah, Daniel Silva can get away with 150,000 word thriller, but you can't, so keep it under 100,000 words." Ultimately I think the book's as long as it needs to be, i.e., my legs are long enough to reach the ground.

2. The second comment is about the chapters. I did not like the huge number of them, and thought you could team up some of them and eliminate some of the extra chapters. I know some authors do all the good guy stuff in one, and divide it with a line, or a star, or something to show where the break in characters is. Always a trick. Generally speaking, each chapter is a scene in my books. Robert W. Walker argues--vociferously, as he usually does--that a scene is not a chapter, period. Well, whatever. I call it the Potato Chip Theory--short chapters help keep the pace going, they're like potato chips, you can't eat just one. Instead of glancing at the next page and seeing that it's 35 pages long and it's time for bed, you glance at the next chapter, see it's 4 pages long and say, "Okay, just this one..." and so on. It works, but not all readers like it. On the other hand, it's worked exceptionally well for Robert B. Parker and Clive Cussler over dozens of bestselling novels. I rather like it. Tom Clancy drove me nuts with his 80 and 120-page chapters. David Morrell has written eloquently and intelligently about various methods he used to get around this, using subchapters, and sections and chapters, etc. Again, no right answer. Hell, one of Michael Connelly's books has NO chapters, just section breaks.

That said, it doesn't always work for all books all the time and although it worked quite well for The Fallen, I do it a little bit less in The Valley of Shadows and probably less in The Sins of the Father, or whatever the 5th book will end up being called. And in my never-ending thriller that I promise myself (and Natasha) I'm going to finish, China Fire, I do it in some places and not in others, depending on my sense of what I want the pace to do at any specific time.

Overall, it was a nice letter. I'm sure that some novelists get their undies in a bunch when a reader starts questioning their technique (especially if they didn't actually, you know, pay for the book), but I try to take these things in stride and keep my ego out of that end of things. If there's a bigger problem--and although I haven't heard many novelists talk about this--due to the lag time between writing, acceptance, publication and letters such as these, it can be a little bit weird because you wrote the book 2 or 3 or 4 years ago and now they're criticizing it--what am I supposed to do about it? I suppose the same thing goes with praise, which is why I tend to stick with "thanks, glad you liked it," and leave it at that.

Thoughts?