Writing books is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding ways to earn a living and I can’t imagine ever doing anything else. That does not mean, however, that every part of the operation is a joy. As with any large-scale endeavour, from creating a garden to running a marathon, from being a rock star to being a prince of the realm, there are times where the effort and the monotony of the job feel crushing.
The blues usually strike me about half way through the writing process. All too often, I believe, the books which the market has traditionally demanded are longer than their subject matter merits. If you write tightly and edit well as you go along you can often tell a story very effectively in 30,000 to 50,000 words (The Turn of the Screw, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, Death in Venice, Heart of Darkness, The Picture of Dorian Gray … I could go on). Publishers and readers, however, have been accustomed for many years to books that are 80,000 to 150,000 words – and sometimes longer. Designed originally to work well as parcels in the American postal system at the end of the nineteenth century, they are simply the size and shape that people have grown used to and, therefore, expect.
Imagine that you have been commissioned to write a blockbuster thriller which will go out under the name of a famous author who always produces books that are at least 400 pages long (around 150,000 words). The plot that has been worked out is great, the characters are strong and you’ve managed to tell the whole thing very succinctly and elegantly in 50,000 words.
That is the morning when you wake up to the realisation that you now have to find another hundred thousand words without ruining the tension, without losing the attention of the readers and without waffling.
Waffling is easy, of course, and by no means an unpleasant way to earn a living, but if you do that you will only have to go back and cut it all out again later, losing thousands of valuable words and dozens of valuable man-hours and severely endangering your will to live.
Like any marathon runner you have to put your head down and keep powering on, but you then become obsessed with word-counts: constantly checking how many words you have done that day (or in the last ten minutes), working out how many more days you need if you continue at that rate, forcing yourself to stay at the screen for just one more hour, then just one more, agonising every time you have to cut something out and the word-count drops by even a few dozen. The days seem to stretch out ahead for ever.
Like the marathon runner, however, and the patient gardener, perseverance and professionalism always pay off and you eventually come out of the darkness of winter into the sunshine once more. The finishing line comes in sight and you are able to sprint to the end, refreshed by the rush of adrenaline and the bloom of another spring, ready and enthusiastic to start on the next book, all memories of the blue days forgotten.
Maybe this is a good moment to confess to another sin: the sin of envy. I can’t help but imagine how glorious it must be to be one of those immortal songwriters who you hear talking about how they penned their most famous track in a matter of minutes, creating a perfect little masterpiece that will be paying them and their descendants royalties for years to come. Imagine for a moment being Ray Davies and dashing off masterpieces like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Lola’ and ‘Sunny Afternoon’. Not only do you then have the rest of the day to please yourself, you also get to sing your stories in front of hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. Contrast that with the long haul of the book writer who is then lucky if he can persuade half a dozen people to turn up to a reading in a bookshop. Envious? I’m positively mint green.