too many words

size matters, unfortunately

Hello, if anyone is still out there. Back in January, I set out my plan for a third approach to writing the sequel to my debut novel Parallel Lines. As of the second attempt, there are two main characters - one from PL and one new - and in the new approach, they meet in chapter 1 instead of chapter 8. (What a stupid idea, in hindsight, that was.)

I’ve now completed this rewrite, and I have about 33,000 words (11 chapters) which make a much more coherent story than before, taking the characters from first meeting to becoming friends. For the first time, I feel confident in both the way the story starts off, and the way I see it going to completion - I never had complete confidence in my approach until now, which is what’s kept me rewriting it again and again. Now I can see fairly clearly what all the stages of the plot are, and I understand the arcs that both main characters will go through throughout the novel. I also got rid of a secondary character completely, who was just slowing everything down. I was never sure where that character’s story would end up; I thought I might work it out as I went along. But after more than a year, I still didn’t know, so it was time to give up on that idea. Another thing I’ve given up on is the idea of the story spanning the whole of the John Major era, the seven years from 1991-1997. Parallel Lines spans the whole of Mrs. Thatcher’s time in office, 1979-1990, and I thought it would be neat to continue that motif - also, I have ideas for a dotcom-era novel set around 1998-2001 which could have made it a trilogy. But now that I can see more clearly the whole story I want to tell, it doesn’t lend itself to being spread out so much. I’ll just let the pace of the story dictate how much time passes.

The problem with it now is, it’s quite a slow start. Thinking about it in a five-act structure (which I wrote about a while back in Story Structure), I’m almost at the end of the first act, which will be complete in chapter 13. All the foundations for the rest of the plot I’ve worked out have been laid, and we’ve got to know both characters. But by the time I’m at the end of chapter 13, I’ll be at around 40,000 words.

What I’m worrying about now is that the sequel is going to be too long to make a sensible book. If all five acts were that long, it’d weigh in at 200,000 words which is a very thick book indeed; not commercially viable as a contemporary novel from an unknown author. Even if acts 2-5 are only half as long as act 1, it’d be 120,000 words, a substantial book, longer than Parallel Lines with its 10-year story. From showing fragments of writing to tutors and peer groups over the years, I suspect some people would think even PL is a bit rushed in places, but I’m completely happy with the way it’s written, with a plot that never stops moving along.

However, for me to be happy that I haven’t rushed the sequel, I can now see that it’s going to need somewhere between 120-200 thousand words. Where is the limit that makes it too long to be commercially viable? The ideas I have are just too big to be written shorter. It seems to me that there is some kind of natural length to write a given story, or maybe a range of lengths depending on whether the style is more under-written (fast paced and with little time for rich detail) or over-written (lots of rich detail to savour but a long read). More complex ideas just need more words to properly explain them.

The choice I face now is whether to write it that long, or to give up on the whole idea of a two-header sequel with one of the old characters and one new. Maybe there are really two novels here, one about a new character, and one about the two old characters - whose story would need less setup since they already know each other.

What I would lose, if I wrote two separate novels, is the way each story supports the other. Kit is young, single and doesn’t like himself enough to have a relationship; he needs to discover himself. Ashley is 30, in a stable relationship for the first time after obsessing about romance through his 20s, and needs to discover what else there is to him besides the romantic. I could write both of these ideas as single-point-of-view, free indirect style novels, but I’d still need other characters for the protagonist to bump into and force them to change (and to avoid the whole thing just being one huge internal monologue), and enough plot to move their story along. I have enough plot ideas to write Kit’s story, set in Newcastle, and not enough for Ashley’s. So I could abandon the sequel and write Kit’s story as a standalone novel, and return to Ashley later maybe.

I’m balancing on the point of this decision, but the moment when it will need to be made one way or the other is when I’ve finished act 1, at the end of chapter 13. I should get there around easter. By then, it’ll be nearly two and a half years since I decided to try writing a sequel. Who knew that writing fiction could be so difficult?