Size Matters

We’ve been harping on and on lately about how big our current project is, which raises the question of why we don’t make it two books.

Two books is something we thought about early in the editing process, after all, we’d have two 90,000-word novels. That’s damn respectable. Turns out there are a host of reasons we’ve opted to not go that way.

First, it feels lazy. We want a good book, not an easy book. That means we need to work hard to craft something beautiful and meaningful, no matter what the size. If all we did was lop it in half, it would feel like cheating, and we’d have two not-great books.

Second, even though it’s long enough to be two books, the plot is not really structured in a way that makes it easy to bisect. As originally written, the story proper took place over one week. We had a large amount of backstory that was told through flashbacks. There was (in our opinion) a really clever structure to the flashbacks that, at the time, we felt justified the use of so many. Our readers, though, did not agree. We had six, and none of them picked up on the clever part, which begs the question of how clever it really was. Since our original vision was a bust, we decided to just tell the story in order. Radical, right? But the scenes that were flashbacks in the first draft weren’t enough to carry the first half of the novel. They were a few isolated incidents, but they weren’t close enough together to be easily connected with a line. Now we’ve written new material to close up the gaps and make the line clear, which is what makes it so damn long. In theory we could chop it at a big tentpole moment and give it a cliffhanger ending. But we don’t wanna. That’s not the way the story is meant to be told. We also don’t want to pad out the first half with artificial plot complications just to make it seem like it deserves to be its own story. That’s not how we roll.

And third, we have ideas for another book, ideas that work well as a sequel but not as the third in a series. When there’s only one point of reference, the second point can go anywhere. But when you have two references, anything further really ought to follow a predictable pattern.

Jen and Kent are very happy that they each have a writing partner they can talk about this kind of thing with. They pity the poor solo authors who have to figure it all out on their own.