This Book is Going to be Five Million Pages
Fucking Jardir.I’m hard at work on the sequel to The Painted Man (soon to be named something else), and it keeps growing. Even as the first book sells all over the Western world, there is universal agreement on one thing: It is a fucking brick. 565 double-spaced pages in MS Word.Your average novel by a first-time author runs about 80,000 – 120,000 words. That puts you in the 300-400 page range, and publishers usually either bounce or edit to fit anything outside of it. I guess that it has a lot to do with print costs and expected returns and reader satisfaction/fatigue, and a million ofther decisions that have little to do with actual storytelling and more to do with the business side of the industry.But epic fantasy is a very verbose genre, and people expect thick books. If you’re churning out a formula novel, like a Piers Anthony Xanth novel or something from Wizards of the Coast’s Forgotten Realms series, you stick to the 120,000 word cap. If you’re writing something more like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, that’s an epic, and the rules go out the window. The problem is, you don’t normally start out writing epics. Jordan didn’t. He wrote a bunch of successful Conan formula novels before he hit it big and started churing out 900 page monsters. Publishers don’t usually want to take the chance and pay huge print costs for something they’re not sure is going to get them a solid return on investment.But despite knowing this, I have always been in the latter category. I don’t know how writers stick to a page cap. That’s why I don’t think I could ever write comics, much as I would love to. How do you make every story fit into 22 pages? God, I would go nuts with that. It is a special art.
Myke told me for years that this was going to bite me in the ass. He was always going on about how I was shooting myself in the foot; disqualifying myself before I even entered the contest. It was a valid point, but my response was always, “I gotta be me.” I go where the writing takes me, and not the other way around.
The Painted Man was 184,000 words when I finished the second draft. At my agent’s urging, I cut whatever I could, trimming it down to 170,000. We still expected that to be a problem.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t. We had no trouble selling the book, and my editor wants to cut some things, but she also wants to add others. There might be a modest reduction in word count when all is said and done, but I doubt it will be anything approaching the 50,000 words we’d have to cut to make it the average length.
I started the sequel, The Desert Spear, with a tight stepsheet and story arc, expecting to keep it at least the same size as the first book, and probably a lot smaller. Alas, it seems not to be. As Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings, “The story grew in the telling.”
Take Jardir, for example. One of three main characters (Jardir, Renna, Arlen), he was supposed to have maybe 40% of the book’s focus. The first chapter was supposed to be a quick account of his “origin” story, showing how he came to be the person he was. This theme is very important in my writing. I like to show all my leads as children first, so you can see the events that shaped them into the adults who drive the story.
So I started in on Jardir, fully expecting the story to grow a bit from my notes, but still thinking it would be two chapters, tops.
So far, that bastard has eaten up FIVE chapters, LONG ones, and he is still going. Every time I start to write about him, I start overflowing with ideas, and his world just grows and grows. His wife gets a chapter. His friend gets two more. Every time I’m ready to wrap it up, I get some huge inspiration and it just goes on.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I am immensely proud of how it’s going. I think it’s some of my best work. The overall story is better for me having explored him so thoroughly.
But I haven’t even started on Renna yet, and I just know I’m going to fall in love with that bitch, too. And let’s not forget Arlen, the Painted Man himself. I can’t very well cut him out of the story, can I?
This book is going to be a million pages long.