by Alex Palmer
The king of the long book is Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time (also translated as Remembrance of Things Past), extends an estimated three million words in its seven volumes. The semiautobiographical novel, considered one of the first modernist novels, was published in France between 1913 and 1927. Book length is often a case of form following function. During the late fifteenth century, books were kept short, often in the form of cheap “block books” printed as woodcuts, which were cheaper than printed books, so that the limited numbers of the literate public could actually afford them. As Gutenberg’s moveable type became the norm and printing and buying books became less expensive, their size quickly grew. During the nineteenth century, the triple-decker novel was the standard format: this method divided lengthy works of 150–200,000 words (about 900 pages) into three books, allowing booksellers to charge for each part. Writing long was also the best option for writers like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy who were producing their works in serialized form. The longer they wrote, the more money they made.
Did You Know?
Each installment of Dickens’s serialized novels ran as thirty-two pages of text, with sixteen pages of advertising and two engraved illustrations. The only exceptions were the final installments, which were twice this size. Going out with a bang (as in the noise the book makes when you drop it) has continued to this day, with series including The Lord of the Rings and Twilight saving the longest volume for last.
In his decades of publishing novels in monthly and weekly magazines, Dickens only missed one deadline: in May 1837, his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died, causing an interruption in the publication of both The Pick wick Papers and Oliver Twist, which were running in two separate publications.
As for modern publishing practices, bigger can still translate to better for the average publisher and book buyer. As the cost for binding books has gotten less expensive, adding a few hundred more pages to a book is a great way to entice readers to buy. The first long novel to top the best-seller list was the 1,200-page Anthony Adverse (1933) by Hervey Allen, which was advertised as “three books for the price of one.”
This trend was still going strong in the twenty-first century, as Karen Holt observed in a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly: “Whether it’s a debut novel or a veteran writer’s swan song, the style for fall is unmistakable. Out: the little gem. In: the sprawling epic.” Holt pointed to the release of doorstops like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (608 pages) and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (800 pages), but massive tomes continue to weigh down the “new arrivals” tables at bookstores throughout the country.
Edgar Allan Poe was no fan of lengthy works, preferring to write short stories, or “tales,” that could be read in one sitting. In a famous critique published in Graham’s Magazine, he calls the novel “objectionable” because of its length and argues that a tale allows that, “During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences—resulting from weariness or interruption.” He states that while writing something too short is a problem, “undue length is yet more to be avoided.”
Poe’s points seem fair enough, but critic Clayton Hamilton argues in his classic work, A Manual of the Art of Fiction (1918), that the difference between short story writers and novelists might have more to do with the author’s maturity than an aesthetic choice. He writes:
The great novelists have all been men of mature years and accumulated wisdom. But if an author knows one little point of life profoundly, he may fashion a great short-story, even though that one thing be the only thing he knows.
Hamilton calls out Poe specifically, saying that while he wrote some of the finest and most visceral short stories in literature, the author “knew nothing” of what life is actually like and how people actually treat one another. Fellow writers certainly would seem to agree with Hamilton’s assessment. T. S. Eliot accused Poe of having “the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty,” while W. H. Auden called him “an unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”
Franz Kafka, a depressive who had his own troubles communicating with people, was primarily a writer of short stories. Hamilton also points to writers like Rudyard Kipling and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote some of their best short stories as young men and did not tackle novels until later in life. Of course, while it’s an interesting idea, this theory fails to account for the experienced, apparently well-adjusted short story writers like Alice Munro or George Saunders or the many troubled and arguably immature novelists we do not need to name here.
Quick Quote
“I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor, and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat.”
—Mark Twain
It also does not stake a claim for writers of the novella—the long short story or short novel, depending on your perspective. This literary form, established by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1353), was referred to by Stephen King as, “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic,” and the parameters of a novella do indeed vary depending on whom you ask. A sample of official definitions put the minimum and maximum word length at anywhere from 10,000 to 70,000 words.
The Man Booker Prize has regularly had to address the difference between a novel and novella. Its rules officially state that the prize goes to “the best, eligible, fulllength novel of the year.” The judges got an earful in 2007 when Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which is a mere 38,000 words long, was short-listed for the prize. When some questioned the choice, McEwan demurred, “That’s their problem, not mine, I think.”
Something of the Rodney Dangerfield of literary forms, the novella rarely gets credit. Classic novellas like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (25,906 words) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (a measly 19,352) are regularly described as novels, while Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and James Joyce’s The Dead are more likely to fall into the short story category. Masters of the novella, such as James (Daisy Miller, The Beast in the Jungle), Steinbeck (The Red Pony, The Pearl ), and Herman Melville (Billy Budd and Bartleby, the Scrivener) are better known as great novelists.
This might be due to the fact that the novella remains an indistinct literary form, or just that “novella-ist” does not really roll off the tongue. Whatever the case, at least no one is accusing them of knowing nothing about life.
Get to the Point
Edith Wharton recalled a time when she and Henry James were driving and stopped to ask for directions. “My good man,” James said to a stranger, “to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand and turn down to the railway station.” Sensing a need to simplify things, Wharton told the man they were just looking for King’s Road. “Ye’re in it,” he said.
HOW DO YOU WRITE THE GREAT AMERICAN (OR BRITISH OR FRENCH) NOVEL?
Writing habits of the greats
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure,” Samuel Johnson said. Readers generally only see the final product of the great works: edited, refined, and set down in its completed form. The “effort” authors put into composing their works offers plenty of fascinating anecdotes and insights about the writers and their craft, and offers those looking to write their own works suggestions for what it takes to write a great book.
For one thing, a consistent schedule is vital. Walter Mosley advocates writing every day, no matter what, stating that, “You don’t go to a well once but dail
y. You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning. Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse.” John Updike, an extremely prolific writer, was similarly forceful about the importance of working the writing muscles on a daily basis: “A day when I have produced nothing printable, when I have not gotten any words out, is a day lost and damned.”
The timing of regular writing sessions can vary. Some write first thing in the morning—Toni Morrison begins before dawn and writes for a few hours, while Isaac Asimov got started at 7:30 in the morning and continued until 10 at night. Kingsley Amis was hardly as much of a writeaholic, grudgingly making his way to the typewriter around 10:30 in the morning, still in pajamas. Flaubert wrote at night and got moving at 10 in the morning.
Some writers break their days into word counts. Ian McEwan holds himself to a minimum of 500 words a day, telling the Daily Mail, “If I write twice that, I’m happy. By the middle of the week I’ll have lost sight of whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. All you have is quantity. So the word count acquires a ridiculous value.” Other word count regimens include:
Ernest Hemingway 500 words/day
Jack London 1,000 words/day
W. Somerset Maugham 1,000 words/day
George Bernard Shaw 1,000 words/day
Norman Mailer 1,500 words/day
Anthony Trollope 3,000 words/day
Thomas Wolfe 10,000 words/day
James Joyce prided himself on quality over quantity. The story goes that when a friend asked if he’d had a good day writing, Joyce replied that he’d written three sentences—a good day for him indeed.
Then there are the epic writing session’s when deadlines loom or inspiration hits. Alexandre Dumas bet a friend that he could write the entire first volume of Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge in three days. Downing huge amounts of coffee, he got out 34,000 words with time left on the clock. Jack Kerouac is one of the most famous speed-writers, producing the entire text of On the Road in three weeks, writing at about 100 words a minute. Capote famously commented on Kerouac’s writing style: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Quick Quotes
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
—W. Somerset Maugham
“I dislike writing, but I enjoy having written.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson
“If you write a hundred short stories, and they are all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.”
—Ray Bradbury
What authors do when they are not writing can also play a role in their productivity. The Romantic poets regularly took walks to experience the outdoors, whether Coleridge and Wordsworth taking in the beauty of the Lake District, or Keats exploring Winchester, inspiring his poem “To Autumn.” Henry David Thoreau admitted that he “cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least ... sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields.” Joyce Carol Oates is an advocate of outdoor exercise as well, writing that, “The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.”
Another type of motion was preferable to Henry James, who would pace about his home in East Essex while dictating his novels to a secretary, who tapped them onto the page with a Remington typewriter. The sound of the typewriter served as a rhythm for James to follow, and he reported finding it almost impossible to find his flow when the machine was in the shop and a replacement was brought in.
Just My Type
Mark Twain claims to have been the first to use a typewriter to compose a novel. In a 1905 essay, “The First Typing Machine,” he states: “I will now claim—until dispossessed—that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” (Historians debate whether Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to use a typewriter. The philosopher is said to have used it to help soothe his migraines and growing blindness.)
Gertrude Stein refused to learn to type and instead did her writing longhand, dashing out a page every couple minutes, rarely going back and revising them before they were transcribed by a typist. This speed did not mean she was particularly prolific—she usually wrote for less than a half hour a day.
Jack London had his own problems with the typewriter. As he wrote in his memoir, John Barleycorn (1913), his brother-in-law used the typewriter during the day, while London got use of it during the nights. Few in the household were likely to fall asleep with the banging London describes having to do on it: “The keys of that machine had to be hit so hard that to one outside the house it sounded like distant thunder or some one breaking up the furniture. I had to hit the keys so hard that I strained my first fingers to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine I’d have operated it with a carpenter’s hammer.”
Philip Roth enjoys pacing as well, writing at his lectern as the words come to him, and a standing position has been surprisingly common for many writers as they worked. Hemingway, always a man ready for action, declared that, “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Virginia Woolf wrote standing up as well, while the seven-foot-tall Thomas Wolfe actually used the top of his refrigerator as a desk.
On the other hand, some prefer a more relaxed approach: Truman Capote considered himself “a completely horizontal author,” who preferred writing in bed. Marcel Proust and Mark Twain did their work lying down as well. Gustave Flaubert was more traditional, writing to his protégé Guy de Maupassant, “One cannot think and write except when seated.” Roald Dahl not only liked to sit in a comfy chair, but generally wore a sleeping bag around his legs for warmth and comfort. The habits of the great writers are as individual as their works, but they share the common theme that skill comes from sticking with the craft, and learning what works by unrelentingly putting “black on white” as de Maupassant called it. David Foster Wallace, writing to Don DeLillo in 1995, expressed his admiration for the author, as well as his own frustration with the process: “Maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit.”
DeLillo sympathized with Wallace’s frustrations, responding that, “Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I’d get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novelwriting and to make it central to my life ... there’s no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that’s all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.”
PART II
READERS
Why audiences love, hate, or ignore the great works of literature
CAN BIG BOOK SALES LEAD TO MASS SUICIDE?
The history of bestsellers from John Bunyan to Dan Brown
The bestseller list is a crazy place. It is a rare thing in literature for a critically lauded work like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections to be placed next to pulpy potboilers by John Grisham and James Patterson, as happened in 2001. Or for J. D. Salinger and John Steinbeck to appear alongside the sensationalistic writing of Harold Robbins, as they did in 1961. Quantity matters above all else on the bestseller list, and this has led to an interesting history since literary hits began to be tracked.
Though hardly what would be called a bestseller by today’s standards, the earliest widespread success in England after the popularization of the Gutenberg press was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which sold 10,000 copies in its first year (it has since sold millions).
Did You Know?
Religious subjects continue to be a hot topic for big-selling books, at least in America. A number of books featuring Christ and his apostles have done well in the United States but not in England, including Lew Wallac
e’s Ben-Hur (1886), Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Big Fisherman (1942) and The Robe (1943), and Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series.
While Bunyan’s Christian allegory remained a standard text in many English households for decades, the next book to ignite the popular imagination was the decidedly secular Robinson Crusoe (1719), which ran through four editions within its first year, followed by Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The strong sales of these books were helped by the fact that they appealed to a broad range of readers, including adults and children.
As reading grew in popularity, the number of books sold also grew. Voltaire’s Candide (1759) sold more than 20,000 copies in its first month, while Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse posted similar sales two years later. Other hits included Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), followed by the gothic successes of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho thirty years after that.
What’s in a Name?
On the nonfiction bestseller lists, books about pets, health (particularly dieting), medical tips, and history books on the American Civil War and World War II sell reliably well. When asked how to write a bestseller, Random House founder Bennett Cerf suggested simply titling the work Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.
