When I wrote "The Sins of the Fathers," I wrote it as an average-length novel. It's about 300+ pages.
I first wrote "Unacceptable Risk" and "American Jihad" as screenplays, however, and they were each somewhere between 90 to 110 screenplay pages.
After I wrote them as screenplays, I thought that I should go ahead and turn them into novels that I could publish as ebooks. I thus went about converting my screenplays to novels.
I could have gone all out and added a lot of description and talked about the color of flowers in the fields and the interior of the cars people were driving and the color of the pants and shirts everyone was wearing and what a convertible looks like and on and on and on and on.
Instead, I decided to write the novels more like two-hour movies than 700-page books.
Why?
Well, a while back I read something about writing in the past and writing today. Someone said that when Charles Dickens wrote about an elephant, he needed to go into great detail about how it looked and felt, etc., because most of his readers had never seen an elephant. Today, however, we don't need to describe every detail of things that our readers see all of the time. It made sense to me.
Since then, I have also read numerous novels that were very long, and I realized that most did not need to be so long to tell the story. I thought, "Wow, if theses novels were more concise, I could read many more great stories instead of reading detailed descriptions of a field of flowers or a cloudy sky."
Then, I thought about the world we live in today where everyone has so many things that are vying for our attention. We can watch movies, play video games, get on Facebook, go for a drive, take our children to the park, read other books, write posts for our blog, write a screenplay or novel, etc. So, I thought, "Why make books so long when we can easily tell the story faster?"
As a result, my novels "Unacceptable Risk" and "American Jihad" are approximately 120 to 130 pages each - about the length of screenplays. That's short for novels, but they can be read quickly, the stories can be enjoyed, and then the reader can do something else. Not a lot of wasted time. I like this system, and I did the same thing for my next three novels. I wrote them as full stories but with minimal unnecessary detail.
Please check them out for yourself, and see if this type of writing works. I hope that you'll enjoy the writing and feel that I didn't waste your time but still told a good story.
You can purchase "The Sins of the Fathers" and "American Jihad" for $2.99 each and "Unacceptable Risk" for just 99 cents at
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_aut?_encoding=UTF8&index=books&field-author=Dean+Malchik
Happy reading.
Dean
P.S. My next novel, tentatively titled "The Life and Death of Israel Goldberg," will likely be more than 400 pages but only because it NEEDS to be.
I am going to begin with a frustration...I can't find the like button, which is too bad for the obvious reason.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all that you've written and I feel validated. Everything I write, I write short. Strunk & White said "Ommit needless words." I believed them and took this as my main admonition, so my books are short, they read like poetry and I'm good with that, but your sugestion of casting them as screenplays sounds so much cooler! Thank you
Thanks. I wish I knew how to add a Like button, but I haven't been able to find it on the template.
DeleteYour Strunk & White comment hit home. I was trained and have worked most of my life as a journalist. We were taught to write according to the ABCs: accuracy, brevity and clarity. I think that has also affected my direction.
That's a good point about the reduced need for description.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Sheila.
DeleteLove it. I'm completely with you, Dean. Sometimes less is more. And often readers paint their own pictures, so they don't need to be spoon fed with every little detail. And sometimes we can convey a description of a character simply through their personality. When I was at the manuscript stage of my novel, I asked 6 women who kindly read it for me which famous personality they thought the male protagonist (who I'd described very sketchily) looked like. All but one said a younger Sean Connery. I found that fascinating, because the character in my mind did look a lot like Sean Connery.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to read novels that have been made into movies and then think about who you would cast to play the characters
DeleteOR
To read a novel, determine the character's look and feel in your mind, and then watch the movie and see who they chose to play the character.
Thanks for your feedback, everyone.
ReplyDeleteI do have to admit one thing though.
If I could write wonderful description like James Lee Burke, Earnest J. Gaines or John Ehle, I probably wouldn't be able to resist. In such cases, the detailed description itself IS an integral element of the story. It is artwork worthy of a reader's valuable time.
But I've read James Lee Burke - and I'm certainly no James Lee Burke and never will be.
Not many are.