The Brevity Problem

I have a problem. I can’t stop overwriting things.

This problem applies to virtually everything I write, but in particular I’m talking about my novels. With the best intentions I set out to write a tidy 100,000 word manuscript, but before I know it, it’s a 190,000 word epic. I can’t help it.

Moreover, I’m not entirely sure why my word count is so high. I don’t write lengthy descriptions of the surroundings every time my main character walks into a new set. I don’t include pages-long odes to the male physical form every time my protagonist’s love interest shows up. I’ve weeded out all those malevolent adverbs, cut back on the sugary adjectives, and my protagonist spends a lot of her time alone, so the dialogue is sparse. I don’t allow her to go off on tangents willy-nilly. As far as I’m concerned, there is very little clutter, and no entire scenes that needn’t be there.


 So what’s going on?

I was recently told that I should divide the book in two, that there is just too much happening for one book. But is my book really a jumble of too many different plot strains, or is it just unconventional for an urban fantasy to be so long, and thus unacceptable? In this day and age, we are all deeply constrained by our genre and we might not even know it. We tend to write what we love to read, so we follow those conventions without even knowing it.

For urban fantasy, there seems to be only really one option lately. A series. Virtually every urban fantasy book becomes a series of five or more books, unless the author or publishers pull the plug. In fact, I’m not sure I have ever read a standalone urban fantasy. Have you?

My book was supposed to be part of a trilogy. This was my first mistake, apparently, because it seems trilogies belong to fantasy or possibly sci-fi. Trying to write an urban fantasy trilogy in this day and age is daring to the point of audacity. This is because trilogies, by nature, are more epic as they have one major overarching story told in three stages, whereas series are often formed of individual stories linked only by the characters and the world they are set in.


As series progress, there are often more loose ends left between each instalment, and they will probably build toward a big finale in the final two or three books.

But the story I want to tell isn’t a series. It isn’t short, separate stories – it is one woman’s journey from good to evil and back again, from loneliness to belonging, from ignorance to knowledge she cannot unlearn. Along the way there are murderers to catch, a revolution, and the Second Coming to deal with, which is why the story breaks down well into three longer books.

So what’s wrong with longer books anyway? Some of my favourite books are in excess of 150,000 words. Three of the Harry Potter books were in excess of 190,000.
The first Book in the A Song of Fire and Ice series, Game of thrones, by George R. R. Martin is 280,000+ words.  Longer books, done well, can consume you in a way that a series of shorter books never will. You can get wonderfully lost in a long book as you immerse yourself in its world and characters.

And isn’t it annoying when a book you find yourself loving ends all too soon? There have been many occasions where I’ve enjoyed a book but felt it was too brief, or found it finished prematurely, the story not really complete, in order to end on a cliff-hanger and entice me to buy the next book.

Brevity can be a bad thing too. It’s in the details that great characters are born and raised, after all. Some writers seem so concerned with a fast pace or the right word count that the plot zips along so breathlessly you barely have time to remember the characters names and before it’s done.

How unsatisfying it is to reach the end of a book and feel it was an opportunity wasted? Good characters, nice ideas, but just not fleshed out enough. Because, after all, when you really love something, you cannot get enough of it. If you love characters or the fictional world they inhabit, you would read an entire book about those characters just doing the laundry, or about a postman’s observations of that world as he goes on his daily rounds.

I think the modern publishing necessity of brevity is linked with the fashion for showing, not telling. Yes, this is a fashion, a trend borne from modernism and cemented in postmodernism I suspect. Telling tends to lead to lengthy exposition, particularly in fantasy, which is why finding novel ways to show the same information often ends up taking fewer words.

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes writers go to such lengths to show the nature and history of their supernatural creatures, for example, that instead of just including a straight-to-the-point paragraph telling the same information, they end up including entire extra scenes in order to relay it through actions and speech.

Consider the Prologue of The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Rings. That chapter is so long, it reads like an encyclopaedia entry, and I have to tell you, it was a slog to read. But I’m glad I read it, because it added so much to the story proper. If Tolkien had tried to show all that instead of telling it, he would have had to write another trilogy just to do so.

But I’m not Tolkien. I’m not delusional; I know the limitations of my writing, the strengths and the weaknesses. And I’m not writing fantasy, I’m writing urban fantasy, remember? Part of the appeal of urban fantasy as opposed to traditional fantasy is its accessibility. It isn’t supposed to be so fantastic that it needs so much explanation; it’s supposed to be a least in part ‘urban’, modern, recognisable.

So if I can’t write the epic trilogy I wanted to write, and the story won’t fit into the accepted series format prescribed for urban fantasy, what options are left? I see only one, and for this I incline my head in thanks to Stephenie Meyer for her popular (albeit critically slated) example - the four part saga.

So apparently I’m now writing a four part saga, not a trilogy. Half of me is delighted to have found this happy compromise, but the rest of me is just overwhelmed at the prospect of redrafting and re-planning not one but all three of the original books.

What have I gotten myself into? And why does the word ‘saga’ make me want to cringe?

As always, comments welcome. Follow me @H_Y_Malyk on Twitter