Short Cuts

By Jay Stringer

First of all, a quick plug. I've written before about Sparrow And Crowe; The Demoniac Of Los Angeles. It's a fresh and exciting comic that blends horror and noir. If you like the books by our other friends of DSD, Chuck Wendig and John Hornor Jacobs, then you'll like S&C. The reason for today's plug is a bit of a seasonal treat. The comic book is coming out on a bi-monhtly schedule, which meant not having a fresh issue for Halloween. So the guys behind the book have summoned up a collection of writing and art talent (I assume with candles and a pentagram drawn in blood on a hard-wood floor) and produced a digital-only anthology. Four stories, 47 pages, and for only 1.99 of your ill gotten gains.
If you already read comics digitally, then just add this to your account and sample some great talent. If you haven't tried digital comics yet, what's been stopping you?

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I've been thinking about short things lately. Mostly short novels. When I talk to other novelista, mostly ones outside of crime but even with some within this genre, I always notice how much higher their word counts are than mine. 80, 90, 100k. Those are epic tomes to me.

In such times you can -and I do- point to the great writers who've written shorter books. Hammett. Cain. I'm not sure there is a better writer working today than Cormac McCarthy, and his award winning book The Road tops out at around the same length I've run up in my first two crime novels. There are some that have surprised me; I was going to include Orwell's 1984 in my list of short novels, but when I took a look at the page count I noticed it was a lot longer than I remember. It just didn't feel like it in the reading.

Therein lies the challenge, of course. The book needs to be as long or short as the story demands, and setting out to write a book with a specific word count is probably counter-productive to that end. 

But I've also found many longer books that have been recommended to me have been put back down again within the first two chapters.The authors just put too many words on the page. It's never fair to name names, but there's a series of fantasy novels that it seems everyone has to read these days, and I tried the first book. I found straight away that I couldn't read it. As great as I'm sure the plot is, I don't need to have the clothes of each character detailed to me every time they enter a room. Nowhere on the huge venn diagram of writing -which balances out plot, character and exposition- do I see a space for the word clothes. 

Part of my mistrust of long books comes from my own shortcomings. That's always an awareness worth having. It was a long enough journey for me to read novels at all. The longer ones just seemed like a step too far early on. And then, when I did read a long one, and stubbornly make my way through, I would find that I wasn't enjoying it. As an adult reader I don't let such things stop me, I'll seek out a good book no matter the length, but as a younger reader that was a huge roadblock.

And as a writer I can't imagine writing one that long. This isn't to say nobody else should either. Each person has their own story to tell and their own skill set for telling it. For me, I can't imagine having a story to tell with a beginning, middle and end, that justifies running longer than, say 80k. Unless I'm adding in extra bits, having a story with beginning, middle, middle, fake end, middle, end, epilogue. I like for my work to be as tight as I can get it, and that usually means a lot of shaving as I go along. I constantly hack away at what I've written, taking out anything that I don't think is needed.

I like to challenge myself, though. So for book 3 I decided to change my approach. I set out to write a longer novel. And at first I powered through. The first act came together very quickly and I sailed on into the middle of act 2. Then I started to struggle. It went against my process and my instincts. I need to be happy with what's gone before to be happy with where I'm at. I don't just write a chapter then move on to the next one, I write a chapter then rewrite it, then edit it, then hack it, then move on. It  takes me longer to write a short novel than it would a long one, it seems, because they both start off in the same place but one takes a lot more editing than the other. 

So what I've found in book 3 is that operation; write long has been a failure, and now I'm going back to fix things that have been bugging me, things that wouldn't be bugging me if I'd followed my instincts in the first place. 

I'm not saying none of you should write long. I'm not saying my brevity is a purer form of writing, or that those of us who cut to the quick are harder workers. All I'm saying is; those of you who can write long? I doff my cap to you. Yours is a skill that I don't have. 

The Whiney Writer

I'm moving this week. We're getting out of our condo and moving in with family until we can find a house. At the same time I'm starting a new position at work.

And it's hell on my writing productivity.

I'm in the midst of a major revision and I'm lucky if I can get one chapter done a night. And no reading done at all.

I hate these moments. They weigh on me. My mind is always turning over stories in my head, figuring out plot twists, working out kinks in the storyline. Yet, I don't have a moment to write them down.

So, I'm sorry for the overly brief blog post, but I need a pick me up. When life gets the best of you, what do you do to keep your writing productivity up?

Since I'm being brief this week, enjoy Pearl Jam's new song:

Skipping

By Russel D McLean

(please excuse any grumpiness this week, Russel's dealing with the trauma of leaving his twenties behind as of the beginning of next week)

Two things caught my attention this week.

#1 was egotistical, a review of THE GOOD SON on The Drowning Machine. A nice review, but here’s the line that caught my attention:

One of the things I most like about this book is that the author doesn't get in the way of his story. He knows when to shut up.

Its that last part. Knows when to shut up. Believe me when I say that’s a huge compliment.

And it brings me to #2.

Over on twitter, I’m following the supremely talented Anthony Neil Smith (once you’re done here, do yourself a favour and go buy his books. And while you’re waiting on them, go read his incredible zine, Plots With Guns­). Now, Smith’s clearly a guy who’s shy with his opinons, so it was interesting to read his reactions to THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO:

Tried reading DRAGON TATTOO. Bored myself silly for 130 pages. Gave up and shook my head at the world's collective bad taste.

It brought me back to something I’ve always said about that book: It doesn’t start for at least 100 pages.

Larsson is of course a publishing phenomenon. And I have said some nice things about the books. But with more time to reflect, I have come to realise that for all the intriguing stuff going on, by God, those books could have been edited down. I couldn’t quote you a line of dialogue from any of them, although I could tell you that I liked the character of Lisbeth Salander a lot, and it was really her that kept me going through the books.

Both of these things – the review and ANS’s reaction to GWTDT reminded me of that rule of Elmore Leonard’s I keep telling people:

Leave out the parts the reader tends to skip.

I am a huge believer in that rule. I find I love it as a reader, and as a writer it disciplines me to get straight to the point, to say what needs to be said. And no, its not about attention span, its about clarity. Not simply of prose but of purpose. A story doesn’t need to trap itself in purple prose and overlong explanatory passages. It needs to punch the reader, to get them to sit up and pay attention. To really focus on the words by making each one as important as the last.

Otherwise, we’re bulking up the story so that readers can drift in and out. So that they don’t have to pay attention. So that they can be spoonfed.

I remember – although I can’t find it – an interview with David Simon in The Guardian where he talked about how the audience had to watch every scene to get the pay off, how they couldn’t leave the room to make coffee or chat on the phone for five minutes, how he wanted to change the way we watch television.

To work with the show. Not passively observe on a surface level.

This is how it should be with stories. The reader should do some lifting, because in the end the real reward we get from a book comes not from the passive act of reading but from the way we engage – emotionally and intellectually – with the text. And if we’re skipping swathes of text or reading them so they can fill in the parts we didn’t want to work to understand, then are we really just wasting time with these things?

So what’s the lesson today?

Make every word count.

Don’t lose your reader because they feel they can drift in or out.

In the end, if it’s a good story, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve written one hundred thousand or one hundred and fifty pages. If every word counted, your readers will thank you.