All the Old Novels Are Shorter (A Rant)

Photo courtesy Patrick Tomasso, via Unsplash

I just finished reading a relatively new science fiction story and I'm working on a review. The story I read is supposedly a very highly rated, very strong-selling example of "hard science fiction," and, spoiler alert, I was pretty disappointed by it. More on that later.

However, for the time being...

In my mind, I kept comparing it to Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, and it kept coming up short. I read Rama years and years ago, and although its details are now fuzzy in my mind, I still remember really enjoying it.

(Again, spoiler alert--I'm going to re-read Rama to compare it with the newer book for the review)

But what has really got me confused is how short Rama is--only about 60k words! By comparison, the other book I just read is around 100k! And yet so little happens in those 100k words!

In an upcoming episode of the Wordy Pair Podcast I run with my friend Justin Fraser, we were talking about the apparent desire to prune "excessive" description from books, and to simplify descriptive language--in effect, to reduce Lovecraft's The Beast in the Cave's first beautiful paragraphs to "I was lost in a cave."

Naturally, we came out against this literary neutering--long descriptions can be incredibly satisfying if done well--but something else happened as we were talking.

We went and looked up the lengths of two books: The Great Gatsby and The Wizard of Oz. To our surprise, both were much shorter than we had expected! Gatsby is under 50k words! It's not even a novel by today's standards!

(The Wizard of Oz is short too, but it's a "children's novel," so you could argue the same standard doesn't apply.)

Of course, there are lengthy classics. Don Quixote comes to mind.
Photo courtesy Mick Haupt, via Unsplash

So, I'm just here to remind you readers and writers that length is not a great measure of the quality of a work! The average lengths of novels seems to be closer to a fashion than a real guideline!

Of course, publishers demand works of certain lengths, but those limits have some softness to them. If someone wants between 5000 and 8000 words, it might be worth seeing if you can sneak in with a masterful 4800 words.

For longer length requirements, you probably don't want to undershoot because of the usual folderol that resubmissions are not accepted, but you might try aiming for the lower bound moreso than the upper.

Anyway, that's my rant, and please forgive me if it's a little twisted. In short: By all means put in extra words if they are beautiful and descriptive and flow well, but at the same time, don't feel bad if your really good work is a little shorter than some random publisher wants!