(This is me organising a bunch of disparate notes and thoughts in one place so I can see them properly.)
I was talking with a novelist acquaintance the other day about novel length. He was having to aim for a 100k word count on a new book because it’s simply what publishers ask for, because 100k is considered a firm expectation by the audience. The audience apparently having grown up on fantasy doorstops, or, I dunno, those fat brick Tom Clancy books.
I remember once briefly talking online to a famous writer who’d wrestled his novella up to 55k so that it would be eligible for novel awards.
Pretty much everything Georges Simenon ever wrote was in the 30-40k range. For reasons. He was once interviewed by the Paris Review, and while that is currently behind their paywall, someone sneakily escaped a copy, ssshhh.
INTERVIEWER
Is length important? Is it part of your definition of the pure novel?
SIMENON
Yes. That sounds like a practical question, but I think it is important, for the same reason you can’t see a tragedy in more than one sitting. I think that the pure novel is too tense for the reader to stop in the middle and take it up the next day.
I once wrote a 30k story, serialised in four parts, that was finally published as NORMAL. Or, as it says on the cover, NORMAL: A Novel. I had a great time with that. At the time, I wasn’t sold on calling it A Novel, as it was 30k and I didn’t want the publisher to get shit for calling a 30k book a novel. I don’t know if they did, but I did. But then, I got shit for GUN MACHINE being “only” 80-90k (I forget the exact length, let alone CROOKED LITTLE VEIN being 60-70k.
The perceived expectation of the potential audience can distort the shape of a work.
INTERVIEWER
One time you spoke about your wish to write the “pure” novel. Is this what you were speaking of a while ago — about cutting out the “literary” words and sentences — or does it also include the poetry you have just spoken of?
SIMENON
The “pure” novel will do only what the novel can do. I mean that it doesn’t have to do any teaching or any work of journalism. In a pure novel you wouldn’t take sixty pages to describe the South or Arizona or some country in Europe. Just the drama with only what is absolutely part of this drama. What I think about novels today is almost a translation of the rules of tragedy into the novel. I think the novel is the tragedy for our day.
Obviously, those points about teaching and journalism come from their time – the interview was conducted in 1955. (And isn’t it just a little wonderfully odd to be able to source and quote an arts interview conducted seventy years ago?) A lot of creative movement has happened in the intervening time. Cut that, and you’re left with the contention that the pure novel is a distilled thing.
(Also worth noting: he considered the Maigret novels less important than his self-described “hard novels,” the work he thought of as serious, because of the structure of the Maigrets. Because they were all told from Maigret’s POV, and the reader could only know what Maigret knew, the other characters in the books could never be given what Simenon considered appropriate weight – he could not descend into them.)
I once wrote a story, ELEKTROGRAD: RUSTED BLOOD, that was informed by my interest in Archigram. (UK) (US) In my head, it was going to be the start of a whole series, with each story containing an Archigram or other experimental-architecture element…
And then I got hospitalised, and then life happened.
I’ve self published a lot over the decades, pretty much as soon as Print On Demand came in, because that was fascinating to me and because I unhelpfully have more ideas and write more words than I can realistically do anything with. And the form I like best – the NORMAL form – is not one publishers like. NORMAL was an experiment for that publisher, and it did fine (and was an Amazon Top 100 book for 2016), but it was and is outside their usual practice and wasn’t intended to be repeated.
I wrote this in 2022!
I need to start writing the newsletter today, and also to start figuring out some of the extra bells and whistles that the new hosting platform provides me. I’ve been talking recently in the newsletter about returning to digital publishing, which I’ve done a lot of in the past — NORMAL. CUNNING PLANS, ELEKTROGRAD and FREAKANGELS are just a few examples —
This has been marinating a long time.
So I’ve been thinking about self-publishing again, just to work in the prose form I like best. Without having to convince anyone else I’m not ill and without anyone else having to risk real money that could more usefully go towards food and shelter for other people.
In my notes, I’ve been calling it “the quick novel,” “the fast novel,” “fast fiction” (ha!) and “the short novel.” JG Ballard also had “the condensed novel.” But maybe “the pure novel” is the term I needed. I tend towards concision as a writer. And that’s something I’d like to explore. I would never actually claim to be writing A Pure Novel, that sounds a little too lofty, but it’s an interesting frame for thinking.
So, in whatever spaces I get for thinking over the next month or two, this is where my spare brain cycles are going. I’d like 2025 to be the year I actually get something done and out within this frame, for my own edification, development and peace of mind if nothing else. Short novels. Probably technically novellas? But I have accidental form in calling 30,000 words a novel, so fuck it, right?
(And covers that are purely typographic solutions, like Fitzcarraldo, Strelka or Faber Poetry.)
