How Many Words Must a Writer Write Down To Know He or She Has Written a Novel?

Word Count

I once read somewhere Mark Twain kept a running word count in the margins of his manuscripts. Word counts are probably a weird obsession held largely by writers. We survive by them. Sometimes we’re paid by the number of words we write. Sometimes we use the count to measure a good day’s work, whether those words add up to a few sentences or several pages.

Word counts also tell us—somewhat arbitrarily—what sort of work we have written. Is it a Tweet (which actually is even more micro, down to the character)? Is it an essay? A short story? A novella? A novel?

A few months ago, a writer friend of mine Gerald Warfield and I shoptalked about just such things. We couldn’t come up with a solid answer. But a blog post from Writer’s Digest gives some novel advice at least, breaking down some average word counts for novels of different lengths.

The link is here. Of course, it’s not the end-all declaration of authority, but it must count for something.

—Todd

Sunday Salon: Le Mot Juste

Adjectives get a bad rap from writers.  Like morphine, they’re good in small doses. They become a bad habit with increased doses.

Mark Twain wrote in a letter:

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

I’ve been reading Tim O’Brien’s July, July, and O’Brien knows how to use adjectives judiciously. They make rare appearances in his prose, but when they do, they are le mot juste, the perfect word,  as here when wounded Vietnam veteran David Todd is lying in a hospital bed dosed on morphine:

Over the next three and a half weeks, off and on, a number of meditative, glutinous-sounding voices discussed the possibility of another amputation, the pros and cons.

What a perfect description of being under morphine and hearing voices, real and imagined — “glutinous-sounding”. Anyone who has ever been under morphine, or any other painkiller, knows that sensation.

And “glutinous-sounding” fits with the liquid, water motif O’Brien has been constructing throughout the novel. In a couple of spots, he uses “liquid” as an adjective. There are a lot of images of water, including a drowning, and David Todd’s wounding by the Song Tra Ky river in Vietnam.

The novel covers the stories of a set of classmates at a college reunion, the class of ’69 of Darton Hall College in Minnesota. It seems to me the motif of liquid conveys the sense of uncertainty these representatives of the Sixties feel, nothing congeals, nothing solidifies, neither love nor politics, past nor present.

Whatever thematic functions the adjectives serve, O’Brien certainly knows how to select them, to give his sentences strength when the adjectives are wide apart. Good sentences for writers to study.

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Editor’s Note: This post has been written as part of Sunday Salon.

Booking Through Thursday: Book Meme

This is my contribution to this week’s Booking Through Thursday challenge:

What was the last book you bought?

Technically I suppose I bought five books today (actually I earned store credit at a used book store for books I brought in; I did pay the sales tax on them, so currency was exchanged).

The five are

1. Nevermore by William Hjortsberg
2. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
3. Coyote v. Acme by Ian Frazier
4. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
5. Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose

Name a book you have read MORE than once

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (3 times)

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?

Thinking About Basic Beliefs: An Introduction to Philosophy by Howard Kahane. This was the main textbook of the required basic philosophy course I took my sophomore year at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University-San Marcos). This book, along with supplemental readings, including Mark Twain’s “Letters From the Earth,” challenged all my beliefs, especially about God. In second place — not that you asked — was whatever textbook we used in my freshman lit course, the one that introduced me to Hemingway via the short story “Hills Like White Elephants”.

How do you choose a book? eg. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews

Friends, usually other writers, recommend them. Or I read a review. And sometimes I browse shelves and become intrigued by a cover or a title: I peak inside, then read a few paragraphs or even pages, and then the writing usually alerts me that this is a book worth reading. Titles can be provoking. At times, if I really like a writer I will try to read everything that writer has written, obsessively hunting down his or her books. Also, if I read a writer’s journalism or short fiction in a newspaper or a magazine and that writing is engaging, I often look for books by that writer.

Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Umm … I love both forms, although because I want to return to journalism, and want to delve into various forms of creative nonfiction, I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately. I love novels, though, and do plan to read more novels, especially in my goal to complete my 100-novels reading project that I started almost three years ago. Not that I will stop reading novels when I’m done.

What’s more important in a novel – beautiful writing or a gripping plot?

Can I have my cake and eat it too? Ideally, I think they should go together, because beautifully-wrought paragraphs strung together without any sort of structural connection, no matter how flimsy or artfully subtle, are just nice paragraphs that go nowhere. It also depends on what I’m reading: If it’s a novel meant to largely entertain or read for escape, I still would rather read something with clear, decent sentences than something jumbled like The Godfather (I really don’t know how this book has managed to become such an iconic part of American culture).

Most loved/memorable character (character/book)

I love Iago in Othello, just this side of Satan in Paradise Lost. Of course, reading Iago is hard to do without thinking of Bob Hoskins’ performance in the BBC production of the play. Hoskins really caught that relish in being evil that Iago delights in.

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?

The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Write Free: Atrracting the Creative Life by Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld, The Practical Stylist by Sheridan Baker, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, and a printed copy of the e-book How To Write A Great Query Letter by Noah Lukeman

What was the last book you’ve read, and when was it?

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind. I finished the book Monday. See my review.

Have you ever given up on a book half way in?

Interesting that you asked this question. I just set aside Bob Shacochis’ Swimming in the Volcano after getting only a chapter in. I can’t really pinpoint why I set this novel aside: I had planned to read it as part of my reading project (see above), but it seemed slow to get started, almost too dense, very unlike Shachosis’ journalism. Last year, I set aside William Gaddis’ The Recognitions about 100 pages in (the novel is about 1,000 pages), and that was my second attempt at reading the book. Before that, if memory serves, it was Typo by David Silverman, a strange memoir of a business gone sour (too many negative associations of an unruly and negative experience tied to that book). And before that, if memory serves, was Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer, for which I’m truly sad, because the film The Stone Reader makes a hero and perhaps object lesson of Mossman. I really wanted that novel to be good, because Mossman had my sympathy, but the novel sorely needs an editor.

I’ve Been Tagged

The Ethical Exhibitionist has tagged me. Here are the questions:

1. What is the best classic you were “forced” to read in school (and why)?
2. What was the worst classic you were forced to endure (and why)?
3. Which classic should every student be required to read (and why)?
4. Which classic should be put to rest immediately (and why)?
5. **Bonus** Why do you think certain books become classics?

Here are my answers:

1. In my freshman philosophy class I had to read Mark Twain’s essay “Letters From the Earth, Letter from Satan.” It turned out to be one of the funniest and most though-provoking essays I’ve ever read. It’s a complaint to God from Satan, similar to Milton — an argument from evil — but without all the heavy-handed theodicy Milton spruces up Paradise Lost with. It began helping me change my mind about the existence of a Supreme Being.

2. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a noxious, humorless autobiographical novel. It’s especially horrible and whiny when compared to William Styron’s Darkness Visible, a clear-headed reflection of the madness that is depression.

3. I think Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time should be added to the list of classics. It is the first memoir that I’ve read to turn me on to the memoir as a literary form, even though I had read several memoirs and autobiographies before reading Conroy. Conroy’s clear, spare prose makes his unflinching look at his coming of age without a father a worthwhile read. It also lacks the “feel sorry for me” self pity that seems to invade contemporary memoir. I would also like to add a regional classic, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. Having grown up in rural Texas, I feel as if McMurtry had been peeping into my world, even though the novel was published two years before I was born.

4. Could someone explain the appeal of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions? It seems to be a darling of writers like Franzen, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace, and seems to be considered a classic of modernism or postmodernism. I like some experimental fiction, but why does experimental fiction seem always to run to 900 pages? The two attempts that I’ve made to read this monster, it has seemed to be prententious and intimidating. Cast it out. Cast it out now. Also cast out Kerouac. How did Kerouac ever turn on a whole generation?

5. Certainly other writers make classics. Some writers find inspiration in The Recognitions. Others find it in Conroy’s Stop-Time, appreciating its simplicity and lack of sentimentality. Scholars and critics and teachers also contribute to canon-making. Somewhere in that mix are the rest of us who read a book or several books and find they speak to us personally, while at the same time pondering universal dilemmas.

Now, let’s see, who can I tag? Helen, Matt, the llama. Anyone else who wants to play along.