Thoughts on Novel Length

Yesterday I topped 100K words in the novel I'm writing. It got me thinking about novel length. These days, the general consensus seems to be most readers enjoy novels in about the 80K area, give or take 10K words. I gleaned this from reading various blog posts and opinion pieces on the great big Internet.

I like a novel that's a bit longer than that, 100-125K, or 325-400 printed pages, but that preference has evolved. Back in the day, I used to like long novels like those written by Stephen King and Tom Clancy. How many novels have those authors published that pushed or topped 1,000 pages? King, several. Clancy, maybe in the 700-900 page range.

CANALS came in at 200K words at first and was trimmed down to about 150K, or about 425 pages (I think). THE MIGHTY T weighs in at a little over 100K and about 325 pages. DEATH OF A MATADOR was in between: about 125K words and in the upper 300s pages. (If I was writing this at home I could look on the shelf at the page counts, but I'm not. I'm in my office-away-from-home: the local Starbucks.)

I'm currently reading UNDER THE DOME by King, and I'm generally loving it. But I think it's too long. I have the ePub version I'm reading on Marvin for iPad, and Marvin tells me DOME had 336K words. If King was a young author trying to get a publisher interested in his manuscript, and he sent in a 336K manuscript, it would've been sent directly to the recycle pile. No passing GO, no collecting $200. By contrast, SILKEN PREY by John Sandford, which I recently read, weighs in at 109K, according to Marvin. DOME is three time longer than SILKEN PREY, and it feels it.

DOME is a great story with delicious characters. I'm 70% into the book now and find I'm reading faster, because I want to see how things turn out. I want the main bad guy to get what's coming to him, and I want him to suffer. I'm anxious to see how the "good guys" take the Dome down (see, I'm capitalizing Dome, too). I understand the main good guy, or supporting good guys, might die in coming pages, and I'm okay with that. But I'll be disappointed if Rennie doesn't get it in the end. King wrote him very well: a delectable bad guy.

Written in Writer in my iPad.

Cops: The Feds Vs. Locals

“People,” Johansen said to the group, after she and Grant walked into the room. “This is the detective from Modesto I told you about, Grant Starr. Detective Starr, will you tell us what you know about the unsubs?”

Grant spent the next ten minutes telling a gaggle of agents and officers from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies what he knew about Samuel Raimes, III, which wasn’t a lot, and what he suspected. 

“So,” someone in a fed shirt said, “you don’t have any evidence. Your case against this guy is all circumstantial.”

“No, we have some evidence,” Grant said. “Not on Raimes, but we have solid evidence on the woman, Mindy. We have her fingerprints and she was ID’ed by a witness. We think she was here this morning and killed the two dam operators. They were knifed, which is her MO.

“We also got some prints off a steel shed they put up in La Grange. One of them came back army, a guy who was discharged after getting caught with drugs. His and another set of prints were found on evidence at the house of the MID guy who got killed the same night the TID guy got killed. So we have that, too.”

“But against the guy, Raimes, you got nothing,” the fed said.

“Well, hell,” Grant said, a little pissed off at the fed. “At least I got something. What’d you bring to the party?”

“I just got here.”

“Well, until you have something, I suggest you shut the fuck up.”

“Hey…” The guy stood, and Grant took a step his way.

The noise level in the room ratcheted up: feds sat up and thrust their shoulders back, making their chairs creak; locals snickered and pivoted to look at the fed, who was ten inches shorter than Grant.

Johansen stood and said, “Guys, a pissing match isn’t going to help us find the unsubs.” Grant and the fed continued their stare-down. “This is a national tragedy, the worst thing since 9/11. Let’s try and keep our heads here.” She placed a hand on Grant’s chest, not pushing, touching.

This scene from THE MIGHTY T takes place at the New Don Pedro Dam in La Grange, California. The terrorist who calls himself John Lightfoot had just successfully attacked the O'Shaunessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy, causing a near-catastrophic flood. The feds have moved in and taken over the investigation.

Detectives Grant Starr and Ralph Bensen were at Don Pedro when the flood hit. Grant needed to call his chief but Don Pedro has no cell coverage, forcing him to ask to use a landline in a building Homeland Security has taken for their headquarters. He tries desperately to avoid Area Supervisor Barbara Johansen, knowing if she sees him he'll likely get sucked into Fed World and lose half the day.

Grant finds a phone and makes his call. He and Bensen are about to enjoy some free fed snacks, coffee and pastries, when Grant hears Johansen's voice calling him from somewhere down the hall. She asks him to brief a gaggle of cops and he gets sucked into Fed World, as he feared he would.

I'm not a cop, nor has anyone in my family, to my knowledge, ever been in law enforcement. What I know about how well federal cops get along with local cops I learned from TV and novels—so take this as fiction if you like. I imagine the locals don't like it when the feds march in and take over investigations; it's gotta be a pride thing.

I took advantage of this real, or imagined, animosity to create some conflict in my story. Stories without conflict are dull. I was pulling for Grant, of course; he shoulda punched the weasel fed in the nose!

Want To Know Who The Bad Guy Is?

    “Like I said, I didn’t think you had,” Grant said. “But I’m going to ask you the same question I asked the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund: can you recall ever kicking anyone out of your group for espousing violence?”
    There was another pause. “Who did you talk to at the Sierra Club?”
    “Tom Richardson.”
    “Hmm.... Did he say he knew anyone like that?”
    “He said maybe, but he would have to check into it. Why?”
    “I’m surprised he didn’t mention Samuel Raimes.”
    “Well, he didn’t. Who’s Samuel Raimes?” Grant wrote the name on his pad.
    “I’m not saying he’s involved in this,” Cranston said. “I haven’t heard anything about him for, oh, eight or nine years. For all I know he could be in prison by now.”
    “Tell me about him.” Grant was all ears; he finally had a name, someone to run down.
    “I did some computer work for the Sierra Club years ago and had to attend a few board meetings. They talked about Raimes in one of the meetings.”
    “What’d they say?”
    “That he was tired of waiting for the judges and politicians to do something about the... Let’s see... Something to do with salmon.” Cranston went quiet for a few moments while he thought. “I remember now. He was upset about the salmon counts in the Tuolumne River. They were dropping and he didn’t feel enough was being done about it. That’s true, by the way. The Chinook salmon are nearly extinct in some rivers.”
    Grant said, “I’ve heard that.”
    “He wanted the Tuolumne River and the Delta returned to their natural state, which, unfortunately, will never happen. But I don’t remember them saying he wanted to blow up anything or kill someone. They just said he was crazy.”

In a "who done it," there are two ways to reveal who the bad guy is: you can keep it a secret until the end, or nearly the end, or you can tell the reader early on. Both methods have merit.

Making the reader wait until the end of the story allows you to build suspense, perhaps more so than tipping your hand early on. 

The most common way to handle the identity of a bad guy is to make it one of the characters the reader is familiar with, but was completely unaware it was him or her. It could be the jealous aunt, or, yes, even the butler. It should be a big shock the reader didn't see coming. When watching films on TV or DVD, it's always fun to stop the show and guess "who done it." A clever author will have most guessing wrong.

I've written that I read a lot of John Sandford books (all of them, in fact). Sandford occasionally keeps the identity of the bad guy(s) hidden while still letting the reader know something about him or her. He'll give the bad guy a nickname, such as something the press might be calling him. In his first novel, the bad guy was called "Maddog." The reader didn't know the Maddog's true identity until about halfway through the story, but that didn't stop Sandford from telling you a lot about him.

In THE MIGHTY T, I let the reader know who the bad guy is in the first chapter; I even let the cops know who he is early on. It's still fun to watch them go about trying to catch him because he's always a step ahead, the characters are interesting, the dialogue is good, and there's enough action to keep your attention even though you already know "who done it."

If the story is well-written, I enjoy both ploys. How about you?