"I will confess that, being generally disinterested in the ins and outs of publishing, the reasons for this bloating of the American novel escape me."
Horrifically prosaic, I'm afraid: it's simply easier to charge higher prices for a paperback when it contains a larger number of pages. It's your pizza equation, turned lengthwise (literally). I watched such monstrous logic overtake Western publishing during the 1980s: the shit-caked tail of business suddenly wagging the Holy Dog of art.
I've always found being given a Procrustean bed into which to fit a longer work (like a novel) destructive to the end result. "Your novel must be such-and-such number of pages long." Somewhere toward the half-way, three-quarter-way mark, I start thinking about stretching and/or compressing things to meet page/word targets ... Have you found this?
"Not only will this novel be, in many ways, unabashedly biographical, but I also find myself, from time to time, using the immediacy and intimacy of its first-person narration to grind axes."
The very notion intrigues this reader deeply.
"I made a bomb from a fire extinguisher. If that can be done in waking life (and I expect it can), don't tell me."
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Date: 2008-07-01 05:36 pm (UTC)Horrifically prosaic, I'm afraid: it's simply easier to charge higher prices for a paperback when it contains a larger number of pages. It's your pizza equation, turned lengthwise (literally). I watched such monstrous logic overtake Western publishing during the 1980s: the shit-caked tail of business suddenly wagging the Holy Dog of art.
I've always found being given a Procrustean bed into which to fit a longer work (like a novel) destructive to the end result. "Your novel must be such-and-such number of pages long." Somewhere toward the half-way, three-quarter-way mark, I start thinking about stretching and/or compressing things to meet page/word targets ... Have you found this?
"Not only will this novel be, in many ways, unabashedly biographical, but I also find myself, from time to time, using the immediacy and intimacy of its first-person narration to grind axes."
The very notion intrigues this reader deeply.
"I made a bomb from a fire extinguisher. If that can be done in waking life (and I expect it can), don't tell me."
It can. (*ducks thrown book*)