Many beginning writers want to write a long book.
There seems to be some sort of belief that long equals good.
Yet, as this episode of The Writing Coach podcast demonstrates, some of the greatest novels ever written are rather short.
In this episode, I cover more than a dozen of my favourite books, all of which are under 60K words long.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #146 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #146 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
If you would like a free book of mine, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com. There’s a book there called Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors. You can grab a free copy there by dropping your email address into the form and joining my newsletter.
All right, today I want to talk about short books. Virtually every client I work with aims for something longer. I almost never have someone come to me and say, “Oh, Kevin, I want help writing a nice short 55,000 word book.” People are always pushing that hundred-thousand-word mark or even going above that.
I get it. I was there when I wrote my first book, The Page Turners. It was this huge 140,000-word epic that mashed together sci-fi horror and fantasy had a ton of characters.
So many writers, especially people writing in genre fiction and in fantasy want to tell their epic. They want to tell their big story, but unfortunately what they tend to do, and what I try to do with that first draft of my book was put it all into a single book. But what I see so often is people come to me with a manuscript with two, three books worth of ideas crammed into one story, and everything goes by so quickly because there’s so much in there. And yet the book drags because it’s so long. It’s the worst of both worlds.
I only became a published author when I took that big giant manuscript and looked at it and said to myself, I come from the world of. In punk rock, we like nice short, scrappy songs and we do it ourselves. And so this big giant manuscript that I’d been shopping around to agents, I was like, Why am I even doing this process? This is not how I’ve ever created my art. And so I took that big giant manuscript, I broke it up into three books, and I self-published that first book, and the rest is history. My career as an author in my career as a writing coach all took off from there. And that first book, I think it’s about 55,000 words, maybe 60,000 words. It’s not a long book, and yet I’ve never once received feedback that people thought it was a short book. It feels like just an average book at 55,000 words. And yet so
Many, many writers think they need to double or triple that word count in order to feel like they really have a book. But the reality is, especially as a self-published author, everything gets easier when you shorten the length of your book. It’s easier to get the book’s first draft written. It’s easier to get the revisions done. It’s cheaper to hire a copy editor. It’s easier to find beta readers. No beta reader wants to read a hundred-thousand-word unpolished manuscript. But people will take a look at a nice short book, and guess what? You’ll get your feedback quicker. Everything is just so much easier and faster with a short book. And some people start thinking, Well, but is it at 50,000 words? Is it even a book <laugh>? I would say it’s probably a book at 40,000 words. I think most people consider a novel anywhere between about 17,000 words to 40,000 words, and anything above 40,000 words, you’re basically looking at a novel.
And in fact, some of the best novels ever written, some of my favourites anyway, are on that shorter end of things in that 50,000-55,000 word mark. And so today I want to go over some of these masterpieces that are on the shorter end of things.
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
First off, S.E. Hinton’s incredible book, The Outsiders. You might know this one because it was made into a film in the eighties. It’s a book about greasers, and it is just such a fantastic book. I think Hinton was like 17 or something when they wrote it. It was insane how young the author was, and yet the book is a masterpiece. But it’s a nice short masterpiece.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s arguably most famous book would be Fahrenheit 451. I love Bradbury. I love Fahrenheit 451. Again, it’s in that 50,000-word mark. A nice short book.
You know what, I should talk about Ray Bradbury more often.
I really love Bradbury, but for some reason he doesn’t come up in conversation as much. I often reference, say, Chuck Palahnuik from Fight Club, but I mean, I like Bradbury more than I like him, more than I like Chuck. So I don’t know why I don’t talk about Bradbury that much.
I would say in terms of my own artistic goals, I love the way Bradbury combines genre fiction with literary fiction. He’s kind of the best of both worlds, and I’ve always tried to capture that. I would say he is like the author of Lolita, Nabokov, he does the same thing as him. They are both really this absolutely amazing combination of edge-of-your-seat thrilling storytelling mixed with just gorgeous literary writing.
And so if you haven’t read any Ray Bradbury lately, go out there and read some of his great stuff, including the nice short Fahrenheit 451.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, is like an early psychological thriller. You could call it a “ghost story” or not. It’s a fantastic book. I think I read that one in university for a course and its in that 55,000-word range. Nice short book.
The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway
Just like the Old Man in the Sea, the amazing Ernest Hemingway masterpiece. A lot of Hemingway’s books are on the lean end of things. I mean, certainly as a minimalist that plays into it, but he also just understood that he didn’t need to cram his books with a thousand ideas. The Old Man In the Sea is a pretty simple story, told wonderfully.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
William Goldings’s Lord of the Flies, we all read in high school probably. When I was in university, there was a Golding course where they looked at Lord of the Flies really in-depth as well. I didn’t take that course, but I remember hearing other folks talking about it and what a great course it was. Again, a book that teachers make kids read at high school level or a university level, an incredible examination of children and culture and violence and humanity and all of these things. Nice short book.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger,
JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, is obviously an incredible masterpiece and a nice short book at 55,000 words.
I recently read At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard, a memoir that paints JD Salinger in not the best light really. As a grown man, he dated a child, a teenager and didn’t perhaps treat her all that well. So I don’t know. It’s hard . . . most authors are horrible people. Everyone’s horrible to some extent. And I suppose it was a different time, but I don’t know . . .
Growing up reading all of the Glass stories and A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish or whatever, the suicide story that he wrote from The New Yorker, all of his stuff. I mean, everything he published was incredible. So I’ve always admired his work, but I think maybe after reading At Home in the World, I might not admire the man quite as much.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Someone who I do admire Virginia Wolf. You guys know I love Virginia Wolf, and her amazing book To the Lighthouse is in the 55,000-word range. A nice short book, super awesome, beautiful writing, as always from Virginia Wolf.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, his most famous book, is a nice short book. I actually just read The Trial for the first time. I think I go through phases in my life where I read a bunch of Kafka, and I always loved The Hunger Artist, his short story and that other short story about the crazy torture device, The Colony . . . I think it’s called The Penal Colony. Anyway, Kafka’s amazing. His writing is great, and the trial is awesome, but The Metamorphosis is really his most famous work, I would think. And it’s a super short book, and yet incredible and stands the test of time.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, and is probably another book that you might have been made to read in high school. I think I was in grade 10 or 11 maybe when I read that book for school. And obviously again, another dark, powerful book about colonial culture and about life and death and all these amazing things. And it’s all captured in a nice concise book.
The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde is perhaps better known for his plays, like The Importance of Being Ernest and whatnot, but his awesome horror story The Picture of Dorian Gray, again, it’s a nice short book, a nice short novel that’s still incredible and scary and dark.
I mean, you kind of tell by the books I’m referencing here, the type of stuff I like. There isn’t a lot of super fun, light, happy stuff in here, but just because I like dark stuff doesn’t mean it has to be long, right? I like nice, short, dark things.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground is a classic novel of Russian literature that . . .Dostoyevsky’s Russian, isn’t he? Yeah, I think so. <laugh> Eastern European writing. Great book about an outsider, something that became very common in the writing of the Beats and whatnot, these stories of people kind of pushed to the edges of society, and that’s certainly what Notes from the Underground covers and captures in a nice short package.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
I actually l just in the mail this week got Brian Talbot’s book, Alice in Sunderland, which is a graphic novel about Sunderland, this place in England where Lewis Carroll and Alice, the inspiration for Alice in the Alice books, comes from. And it’s about theater and it’s about mythology, and it’s about art, and it’s about Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, incredible, incredible graphic novel that really pushes the edges of the medium and might surprise you. It’s not what you think of when you think of your typical comic book.
Anyway, that incredible book was inspired by and is about Louis Carroll’s Alice’s Advetures in Wonderland, a nice short book. Nothing long about it. You can read it to your kids in a few evenings. And just a wonderful masterpiece of insane fantasy storytelling.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut,
Speaking of insanity, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, is his world war II time travel alien masterpiece. I mean, I guess everything Vonnegut did was a massive piece. I feel like each book is as good as the next, but Slaughterhouse Five is one of the ones that’s really held up there as one of his top books along with Breakfast of Champions and a few others. But Slaughterhouse Five isn’t too long, yet a great, nice concise book.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Even something like the first Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy is short. There you go. See, not everything I read is Dark <laugh>. We got some Douglas Adams in there. That first Hitchhiker’s Guide book is short. I mean, I think, did it start as a radio play or did it get turned into a radio play after it was a book? I’m not sure which way it worked, but perhaps because of that relationship with audio and radio play, it was a little shorter than it might otherwise have been. Or maybe I’m crazy. Maybe it did start as a book. Either way. It’s a nice short book.
So hopefully what you take away from this list is that you don’t have to be long to be a masterpiece. You can write incredible books that are nice and short, and when you do, it makes a lot of things easier.
I’m always ragging on The Order of the Phoenix, but I have got to do it again. I would say of all the Harry Potter books, it’s maybe the worst or the second worst. I think that first book is not great. The first act of the first book is fairly atrocious, I believe, but obviously, it’s set up everything to come. So maybe I will go with The Order of the Phoenix as the worst of all Harry Potter books. And I would say the reason that it’s the worst is because it’s ridiculously long and bloated. It takes 300 pages or something to get Harry two Hogwarts <laugh>. The length of the entire first book is just the first act of order of the Phoenix, and there are some conversations with Dumbledor that go on for 15 pages. I mean, she was so powerful. No one could edit her at that point, and I think ego got in the way, and she just wrote a bloated book that should have been trimmed back. And so not only do I believe shorter books can be great and are easier to produce, I also think longer books can actually be bad. Some of the worst books have sometimes trimming, sometimes putting boundaries around ourselves make things better.
There was once a Letter from Mark Twain where he wrote a letter to someone. It was like a 12 page letter, and at the end of it, he said, PS, sorry for this letter being so long, I didn’t have time to write anything shorter, <laugh>. The point being it takes hard work and thought to create something concise, and perhaps with the order of the Phoenix, no one was there to tell her, Hey, take the time to tighten this up a bit.
All of which is to say, when you’re writing today, when you’re looking at your manuscript, ask yourself, how long does this book really need to be? And are there places here where the story’s getting bloated? Or just opportunities for me to tighten my pros to make the book a little bit shorter? All right, that is it for this episode. Don’t forget to head over to www.kevintjohns.com. Grab that free book of mine. There’s a little tab at the top that says Free book. Click on it, and you can get your copy of Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors
Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
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