Size does matter: keep an eye on manuscript word count

I write long, especially on first drafts—and I am not alone. I see the same dangerous prolixity in the manuscripts of many of my editing clients and writing students. It’s easy to understand why we all do this—we ramble on, blundering about in the uncharted darkness of our own imaginations as we try to find the right path into the heart of our stories. And the more we ramble, the higher our word count creeps.

I’m struggling with that now on my ghost story. Intended as a middle grade novel, at the rate I’m going, I’m worried that it’s  going to top out at over 70,000 words. And although it’s true that the first Harry Potter novel was about the same length—77,325 words, to be exact—my projected 70,000 words is still on the long side for a middle grade book.

“Hold on a minute,” you may be thinking. “Are you actually obsessive enough to count every word in 'Sorcerer’s Stone?' "

No—but the Accelerated Reader program did. And they have a free tool that you can use to learn just how many words a published book contains.

Why should you care? “My book is special,” I often hear. “Sure, it’s on the long side, but 'So-and-So' is long, too. I’m sure it won’t matter to editors that my picture book is 2,000 words instead of the 500 to 800 they are asking for these days, or that my YA paranormal is 120,000 words when they expect 70,000.”

Don’t delude yourself. Whether we like it or not, size does matter to prospective publishers. The longer the book, the more it costs them to print it, and the more they have to charge for it. And this in turn increases the risk that the book will sell fewer copies due to price resistance on the part of parents, schools, and young readers.

So yes, a proven writer with a successful sales record and a built-in audience of fans frothing at the mouth for the next book can write as long as she wants. That’s why the fifth book in the Potter series, Order of the Phoenix, was a whopping 257,154 words long. But don’t expect any publisher on the planet to give the rest of us mere mortals the same perk.

To estimate how long your manuscript should be, I think it’s helpful to make up a list of several titles in the same age range for which you are writing, then go to the AR book finder site to see what the word count of those books is.

Do a search for the book you want to check, then click on the blue underlined title in the result that comes up. That will take you to a window where you will find the word count. See what the median word count is for all the books you check, and aim to hit that mark in your own manuscript. For most of us, that means streamlining—for me, too!

There is of course another compelling reason to streamline your manuscripts: the tighter you write, the more powerful your prose and the more gripping your story will be.

Remember, especially you first-time authors, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the length of a manuscript and its chances of finding a publisher. In other words, the shorter the better.

PS: Many thanks to Katie Davis at the Institute for Writers for sharing this site with me.

Power Can Go To Your Head: The Perils of Omniscient POV

Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles on demystifying viewpoint. The originals will appear first as posts on my Spontaneous Combustion blog, then be archived on my website as downloadable PDFs.

Library of Congress

Some of my favorite books are written in omniscient viewpoint—and yet omni POV is my least favorite form of narration. It makes even the most modern of books sound antique—and don't even get me started on the almost ubiquitous head hopping to be found in novels with omniscient narration.  I am convinced that such head hopping is the leading cause of vertigo among avid readers. Seriously. The National Institutes of Health should do a study.

OK, let me remove my tongue from my cheek for a moment. If you have read the earlier installments of this web series on viewpoint, you will already know that I am just a teensy bit prejudiced in favor of single viewpoint.  I'm not all that fond of shifting or multiple POV; and I have just made it obnoxiously clear that omni POV, as I will call it for short, is also a member of my Hall of Shame.

That being said, I adore books like Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket—both of which make use of omniscient narration. And I'm not just pinching my nose, holding my breath, and vowing to "get through it" when I read these books either. I actually enjoy what these two gifted storytellers are able to accomplish with their skillful use of omniscient viewpoint.

So what separates good from bad when it comes to omni POV? And why do I think that it is a very dangerous form of narration, especially for new writers?

Before I talk about that, let me back up and make sure it is clear  exactly what omniscient viewpoint is. It comes in several different flavors, the distinctions between which can get fairly subtle.  In the book The Power of POV which I have recommended multiple times in this web series, Alicia Rasley divides omniscient narration into three basic kinds: objective, classical omniscient, and contemporary omniscient.

For the purposes of this piece, however, I don't think it's useful to delve too deeply into the distinctions between them. If you're interested, read Rasley's book [which I think you should do anyway].

I think the most helpful way to look at omniscient narration is simply to think of it as another kind of third person. We are already familiar with limited third person, where a book is written using he/she but the perspective remains inside the mind of one or more of the characters.

Well, in omniscient narration you are for the most part outside the viewpoint of any of the characters. Thus you can think of omni POV as a distant or impersonal form of third person rather than a personal one; or an exterior form of third person rather than an interior one.

Photo by Steve Wilson

Whatever it is called, when you write in omniscient narration you are not limited by anything any of the characters know—hence the name omniscient, which means all-knowing. Omni POV is a good way to let readers in on information that you don't want your hero to know just yet. For example, if your main character is trying to sneak up on the lair of the villain, you can increase the tension and suspense for readers by letting them know about the evil minions lurking in the shadows, while at the same time keeping the hapless hero in the dark about the danger that awaits him. " Three men with guns stood as still as statues on the other side of the door whose lock Archie had just successfully picked."

Omniscient narration is also handy in certain genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, and sweeping historical sagas. Here a writer can use omni POV to do two things. First, the all-knowing author can use her omniscience to fill readers in on necessary history or backstory that again, no one character might know.

Second, if it's important to the book for the author to keep track of how multiple characters are affected by something like a war , natural catastrophe, man-made apocalypse, or epic quest, omniscient narration is a smoother, more seamless way to do that than a frequently-shifting multiple POV. [Which can end up feeling like a game of musical chairs; when the chapter stops, readers wonder, which character's chair do I have to scramble to sit in next?]

But in a touch of dramatic irony that fiction writers can appreciate, it is the very strengths of omni POV which can lead to its doom.   The all-knowing writer's ability to expound at length on absolutely any character's backstory, any event's history, any fantasy world's provenance,  or any sci-fi gadget's fascinating inner technology can all too quickly lead to the dreaded "information dump." That's what it's called when a writer allows the characters to go into hibernation and the plot to stall out while she goes on and on for pages of exposition, in what amounts to a term paper within the novel. Boring!

And if you're not careful, omniscient narration can lead you to reveal too much, too soon—which can ruin a good thriller, ghost story, or mystery.

I also think that omniscient narration can sound old-fashioned to today's readers, since many of the classics that we grew up on—or were forced to read by our English teachers at school—were written in omniscient narration. So even if a book was published in the 21st century, if it is written in omniscient POV, we feel a sort of literary déja vu when we read it—a flashback that makes the modern story feel as if it were a relic from the 19th century.

But to me the number one failing, the Fatal Flaw, of omniscient narration, is its impersonality. Readers don't know who it is that is dispensing this encyclopedia of information. Is it some god-like narrator, or is it the author? If it's the latter, is he or she wearing an invisibility cloak that we're supposed to pretend not to see, or is this some kind of purposeful meta-fictional insertion of the writer's persona into the book?

Zeus
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen

Or is the narrator an eerily amorphous no one at all? That's the hallmark of what Rasley calls objective  or camera's-eye POV.

And not only are readers unsure of who the narrator is in omniscient viewpoint, and what their relationship to that narrator is supposed to be, they also aren't given the opportunity to get know any of the characters all that well. As a consequence,  readers may never bond with any character. That emotional distance heightens the risk of alienating readers from the book all together, to the point that they put it down for good.

Writers who use omniscient POV know this, which is perhaps why you see a lot of what is called "dipping," or momentarily slipping into the viewpoint of one of the book's characters. JK Rowling is a genius at this. The first chapter of  Goblet of Fire is a superb example of how to write omniscient narration well.

Midway through the chapter, Rowling makes the graceful narrative glissade that is called dipping. Within the space of one paragraph, she descends gradually from the stratospheric heights of omniscience. First she slips into the heads of several nameless village boys, all at once, in a kind of joint or communal POV, telling us that they teased the crippled old gardener Frank Bryce simply for the cruel fun of it.

Then, in the very next sentence, Rowling descends even further. This times she dips into Frank's head to tell us that Frank has misinterpreted the boys' motives. He believes that they torment him because they blame him for the murders of Tom Riddle and his family—though we already know that those murders bear the unmistakeable stamp of dark magic.

The fact that Rowling changes POV twice in one paragraph could mark this as head hopping—the worst of the writer's Deadly Sins. Indeed, it can be difficult to know when a writer has transgressed, crossing the line from dipping to head hopping, and I am probably a harsher judge of that than most.  Nonetheless, I think Rowling avoids being branded with head hopping here primarily because for the rest of the chapter, she stays in Frank's head. If she had jumped back out of Frank's head again, that would have been head hopping.

But it's a narrow escape, and that's my point; it's devilishly difficult to avoid head hopping when you write in omniscient narration and try to dip. Harsh judge that I am, I think that  author Trenton Lee Stewart made that mistake in his best-selling middle grade novel The Mysterious Benedict Society.

Stewart uses omniscient narration throughout the book, though he frequently dips into several of the characters' viewpoints. Most of the time, he stays in a POV long enough to avoid head hopping—but not always. Look at this passage where the adult mentor is telling the four young characters about a challenging task ahead. One of them gets a little nervous and needs a bathroom break.

...and then Mr. Benedict added, “Now, do you truly need to use the bathroom, or can you wait a few minutes longer?” [Omni POV]
Sticky truly did, but he said, “I can wait.” [Sticky's POV]
“Very well...” Mr. Benedict said [Omni POV]

To me, going into a character's head for just one sentence, and for no compelling plot purpose, is head hopping. So with apologies to Mr. Stewart, I do believe that's what he's done here.

The point is, if a  talented and experienced author can make that kind of slip-up, what hope do the rest of us have of avoiding the same trap? It is just too perilously easy to go astray with omniscient POV.

So proceed at your own risk. If you are writing the kind of book that might benefit from the peculiar powers of omniscient viewpoint, then go for it! Just keep your wits about you at all times, and stay on the lookout for the pitfalls that await the unwary writer with this form of POV.

[© 2015 This article is subject to copyright. Please do not use or reproduce without express written permission from the author.]

Next—Which POV technique is best for you?

The smell of hope: falling in and out of love with Madeleine L'Engle

When I was ten years old, I fell in love—twice. First it was with my fifth grade teacher at Indian Hills Middle School in Cincinnati, a woman named Nancy Browning, who was the first person ever to tell me, “One day you will be a writer.”

Mrs. Browning introduced me to my second love—Madeleine L’Engle, the writer who more than any other inspired me to weave stories of my own. But this summer I fell out of love with L’Engle—and was surprised at what a profound loss that was.

Let me tell you the story, and fair warning—L’Engle fans may get angry with me before it’s done. Though as she once said in an interview, there is a “smell of hope” at the end.

Back in fifth grade, it wasn’t L’Engle’s most famous work, the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time, that captured my heart, it was another book called The Arm of the Starfish. To a young girl growing up in the Midwest, that book was intoxicating. It transported me into a world where teenagers were sophisticated and urbane, speaking several languages, drinking coffee, and getting on jets by themselves to fly to Lisbon and Madrid. That’s what I remember—that and the extraordinarily loving, erudite, and over-achieving family of Calvin and Meg O’Keefe. He was a marine biologist working on a remote island off the coast of Portugal; and since I wanted to be a astronomer at that point, the scientific aspect of the book enthralled me.

Having read Starfish, I wanted more. That’s the way I’ve always been: when I find a writer I love, I read everything he or she has ever written. That’s how I discovered that Meg O’Keefe was far more than the stunningly beautiful yet self-effacing mother of seven [yes, seven!] kids in Starfish—she was the awkward, ugly-duckling Meg Murry of A Wrinkle in Time. Wrinkle became my favorite book of my entire childhood, but I always kept a special place in my heart for Starfish, and later for the cozy family drama, Meet the Austins.

I grew up, and in the way of things I left L’Engle’s books behind. Though I must have talked about her a lot, because my college roommate made a point of stopping in a bookstore in Chicago one day when she saw that L’Engle was there, and sent me a signed copy of Wrinkle.

To this day, that autographed Dell Yearling paperback is still one of my greatest treasures.

L’Engle was an important part of my childhood, and in a variation of the six-degrees-of-separation game, she is part of my identity as a writer as well. My editor, Stephen Roxburgh, was L’Engle’s editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux for sixteen years. I had no idea of that when I sent him the manuscript for my first novel, Cheshire Moon. He let that fact slip over the phone when he called to offer me a contract. I raced to the library afterwards, and found that L’Engle had dedicated one of the books in her Time Quintet, Many Waters, to Stephen. The mere two degrees of separation from her—from a woman who in a significant way felt like a literary mother to me—meant so much. I felt as if Madeleine herself was anointing me, sealing my worthiness as a writer with a vicarious benediction.

 But even then I was unaware of all the many books she had written since Starfish and Wrinkle. L’Engle was a prolific writer, both for children and adults, in fiction and non-fiction. I did stumble across some of the novels she wrote for adults, and found them dated and a bit off-putting, to be honest. That was okay, I rationalized. Those books weren’t the reason I loved her.

I liked her non-fiction better: the memoirs she wrote collectively called the Crosswick journals. They gave me the same warm, cozy feeling as had Meet the Austins—a feeling that it was possible to find meaning, purpose, and even an island of serenity when adulthood wasn’t the perfect idyll you had imagined it would be as a child.

Then for some reason this summer I was filled with an explosion of nostalgia. Maybe it was my father’s death in February, sparking a need to go back in my memories and relive the happy moments of my childhood. Whatever the cause, I found myself wanting to re-read Wrinkle, Starfish, and Meet the Austins. I wanted to try some of the many other children’s books L’Engle had written as well. Chronos and Kairos, she called them: books set in quotidian time, and books set in a kind of timelessness that is as close as humans can come to eternity. There are five books about the Murrys in the Time Quintet, four books about the O’Keefes, and seven or more books about the Austins, many of which intersect. L’Engle’s galaxy of characters have a way of popping up in books where you least expect them.

I sat down with A Wrinkle In Time first. “It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, in a sly literary joke. And I settled in happily with Meg under the quilt in her noisy attic bedroom, waiting for Charles Wallace and Fortinbras the Labrador; for hot cocoa made over a Bunsen burner by her scientist-mother; and of course for Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit to blow in on a gust of wind, quoting literature and speaking in two dozens languages. This was going to be good, I thought.

Only it wasn’t.

As I turned the pages of each chapter, I kept asking myself what had gone wrong. Did some literary gremlin sneak in when I wasn’t looking and substitute another writer’s words for L’Engle’s? I couldn’t find the luminosity that I remembered being there as a girl. Now the book seemed clunky and awkward, as if L’Engle were a novice trying too hard to be literary and deep and meaningful.

Starting to panic a little, I read the sequel, A Wind in the Door. I started to breathe easier when I read the first four chapters; they seemed more fluid and lyrical, just like the L’Engle I remembered. But then I slammed up against that same sense of falseness. The way L’Engle was writing about her characters and plot events didn’t seem authentic or organic to me. OK, I thought. After years of writing and editing and teaching, I had just gotten jaded.

A bit more desperate now, I kept trying. I re-read Arm of the Starfish and Meet the Austins, and sadly I had the same negative reaction. Though I did find things in both books that I enjoyed, I kept stumbling over one thing: a disturbing sense of artificiality, almost pretentiousness. Neither her characters nor her plots seemed at all realistic to me, not even within the story world she was weaving. I gave it one more try, with the second book in the O’Keefe family series, Dragons in the Waters—and it was awful, one of the worst books I have ever read.

That was it. I was done. And I was heart-broken. What had happened? What had changed—L’Engle, or me?

Perhaps, as L’Engle herself writes in her books, I had lost my willingness to believe, and so I had lost the fundamental ability to appreciate the special kind of truth with which fiction writers work.

Except I knew that I had not lost that belief. I am a fiction writer, too, and I know deep in my bones what L’Engle meant about truth, how it differs from fact, and where it is to be found. I write fantasy, and I read fantasy, and I am still able to get deliriously and ecstatically lost in such books by other authors. The fault wasn’t in me.

But I’m not sure the fault was in L’Engle either; in fact, I’m not sure fault is the appropriate word to use here at all. I think the wrenching sense of disillusionment I was experiencing with L’Engle as a writer may be a natural process: a kind of literary growing up. All children have to grow away from their parents, to a certain extent, as they claim their identity as adults. I think perhaps that is what has happened with me and Madeleine. I have grown away, both as a reader and a writer. I don’t shape my books the way she shaped hers, and that’s fine. It doesn’t make her wrong and me right, or me right and her wrong. It just is.

From what I’ve read about L’Engle, both in her own nonfiction works and in articles and books about her, theme was deeply important to her. She dismissed J.K. Rowling’s Potter books with a sniff. “"It's a nice story but there's nothing underneath it."

L’Engle was dead wrong about that, in my view; there is a great deal beneath the Potter books. In fact, Rowling mines many of the same thematic veins as does L’Engle: friends and family, good and evil, love and sacrifice. It’s just that Rowling does so in a less obvious way, whereas L’Engle wears her thematic heart right out there on her sleeve.

And that I think is the problem I am having with L’Engle’s books now as an adult. Every writer had something they are burning to say; that’s not the issue. But with L’Engle, it’s too obvious what her burning issues are. I think theme should appear to readers to arise almost indirectly from a book. If the book is working—if the writer has allowed the characters to take on lives of their own and act like independent people, not puppets; and if the writer is allowing the plot to arise out of the interaction between characters and the situation in which she has set them—then readers will be able to tease out for themselves what the theme is.

That is almost the exact opposite of how L’Engle wrote. She can be quite preachy, especially about love, faith, and belief. Somehow I didn't see that as a child, but today, it’s all too obvious when I sit down with one of her novels what her thematic goals are. And in case I missed that, she feels free to let some of her characters deliver sermonettes about it. And a novel should never be a sermon.

On top of that didactism, her child characters all seem almost preternaturally mature to me: intelligent, highly-educated, with sophisticated tastes in music and books, and with psychological and spiritual insights well beyond their years. And I’m not just talking about the prodigy Charles Wallace in Wrinkle either: all her young characters in all her books seem this way to me, like idealized and shrunken adults. I grew up in the Midwest and have spent most of my adult life in the rural South, so maybe I’m missing something. Are kids in New York and Connecticut, where L’Engle lived, like this? Do they listen to Brahms and Bach and Schubert? Can they hold their own in discussions about higher order math and physics with Nobel laureates?

So last month I closed the door on L’Engle, and in some way on my childhood as well. No more, I thought. I wasn’t reading any more of her books.

I felt empty.

Then I happened upon two things: an infamous 2004 New Yorker profile of L’Engle by Yale English professor Cynthia Zarin, and an unusual biography of L’Engle by the literary critic Leonard S. Marcus, Listening for Madeleine. The latter is not a traditional biography; rather, it is an anthology of brief recollections about Madeleine from fifty people who knew her—including my own Stephen Roxburgh. That alone was enough to get me to read the Marcus book, which I just finished yesterday.

And though neither the profile nor the biography are always flattering to L’Engle, I came away from them with a profound sense of relief. L’Engle had a lonely childhood, and her adult life was like everybody else’s—a mix of joys and burdens, triumphs and sorrows. Her family both adored her and were exasperated with her. Her children and grandchildren said that for Madeleine, truth was always what she decided it would be, regardless of the facts. Her fiction was based too closely on their real lives for the family’s comfort, and her non-fiction was so heavily fictionalized that they didn’t even recognize what she was writing about. She remained in denial about the alcoholism of her father and son, even when it killed them both. Apparently her marriage wasn’t as close as she said either. Her ex-son-in-law, an Episcopal priest, said the "invention" part of the title of her memoir about her marriage,Two-Part Invention, was ironically apt.

Many of L’Engle’s friends and fans were upset by these revelations, feeling that they undeservedly tarnished her image. For me, however, it had the opposite effect. It was paradoxically liberating. Discovering that my childhood idol had feet of clay, just the like rest of us, didn’t diminish my respect for her one whit. Rather, it renewed the love I had lost. I’m not sure I understand fully why this is so, but I think it helped me to stop expecting perfection—either from her, or from her books. There are no masterpieces. I don’t care who your literary idols are—from classical writers such as Shakespeare and Austen to contemporary bestsellers such as Rowling or John Green. You can find flaws in every book, even those by the masters. But this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy their books, nor does it mean that you can’t find deep meaning and beauty—and yes, even truth in them.

I should have known that. My books are certainly imperfect, and as a writing instructor and book editor, I’ve read enough manuscripts to know that nobody else’s books are perfect either. They can’t be; that’s an unrealistic expectation. What matters is not the perfection of the book—much less of its author—but the story. Does it have heart? Does it grip you? If so, then it is a success.

When I step back now and look at L’Engle’s body of work, what I can’t believe I missed before is how hard she worked at trying to create through her books the world she wanted to live in—a world where families were always large and close-knit, where mothers were always beautiful and brilliant and still had endless time for their brood of children, where people burst into hymns and quoted Frost and Shakespeare and obscure Orthodox saints while they were scraping carrots,  where tesseracts and mitochondria and cherubim and unicorns were dinner table conversation, where deep lasting friendships were forged and sustained over cosmic struggles of love and evil. L’Engle’s life work as a writer was not just to invent that within the pages of a book; I believe she was in a very real sense trying to incarnate that, to bring it to life within the ordinary, day-to-day world of Chronos.

Maybe my story has a happy ending after all. As children always do, I had grown up and discovered that the writer I idolized was just a human being: neither magician nor saint nor sage, but still worthy of admiration and respect nonetheless. Perhaps now I can relax and slip under the quilt again with Meg in her drafty garret, and follow her and Charles Wallace from Connecticut to Camazotz with a new kind of joy.