Today I hit the magic number on the word count for Winter Fugue. The number is 80,000. That’s how many words I’ve got. They’re clean and serviceable, so I’m pleased to have them on the page, although they’re not yet in their best possible shape. They’ll need further revision, further tightening, especially with an eye towards their holistic function, their service to the work as a whole. Nevertheless, in their current state, they do what they need to do. They convey, without any lack, the events, the emotions, the rhythm, the tone, and the senses Winter Fugue wants to convey. More than that, by reaching the magic number, they give the novel its optimum length. Pretty much any how-to guide for aspiring novelists will tell you that 80,000 is the target to aim for. According to the conventions of the mainstream publishing industry, that’s roughly how long a proper novel is.

Except Winter Fugue isn’t quite halfway complete. Lately, as I pace out each new chapter relative to the ones before it, I’ve been figuring that the manuscript will finish up somewhere in the vicinity of 180,000 words. Way too long, but there it is. Not much I can do about it. That’s the way this book wants to be. For that reason, on top of just bringing the book into existence — on top of summoning the intellectual, emotional, and physical stamina necessary to sustain the pace of my output until the book tells me it’s done — one of the fresh challenges I’m starting to face up to is the task of condensing it all into a summary form. Winter Fugue is at a point in its development where I have a clearer sense of its trajectory and its overall shape than I did when I began. This means it’s at a point where I’m thinking more carefully about where it might go when it’s no longer in my hands, about how to place it in the hands of initial readers, potential publishers, and so on. How can a piece of prose so much longer than the ideal novel be shortened, compressed into a synopsis, in a way that doesn’t imperil what its length achieves? Continue reading →

Among the gifts I received for Christmas was a book voucher to the value of £100. I used it to pick up a dozen new paperbacks that ended up making me nauseous. To be fair, I had anticipated the feeling. It’s a familiar one in the process of writing a novel. I can barely write a word without first looking around at the superabundance of novels already in existence and asking myself if the world is really in need of a new one like Winter Fugue. More than that, I can barely write a word without first looking over the handful of novels that I consider flawless, the novels that I’d say have changed my life, and wondering why a new novel should be written when whatever faint power it possesses will almost certainly fall short of theirs.

It’s a truism of writing workshops that it’s impossible to become a writer if you’re not first and foremost a reader. I don’t disagree with that, but I also recognise the double-bind it involves. For me, being the reader I am, it’s impossible to write the novel I’m writing without bearing in mind the force of the competition it faces. I’m constantly aware of the inadequacies it harbours, relative to the best of its kind, and I’m aware, too, of the obscurity that likely awaits it if it makes its way into print. To write it at all, in fact, is to labour away in conscious defiance of this dual awareness, with a wilful dismissal of everything that the reader in me is trying to warn the writer about. Continue reading →