February 2023 – KJ Charles

This is a post about…something. Not sure what yet. But in my grandfather’s wise words, “How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?”

Let’s start with a haiku.

Years ago—I mean years, more than two decades now, I was reading a book of haiku from a British Museum exhibition, just trying to, I don’t know, see how they worked and what the form did. I read quite a few. They passed through my brain. And then I read this one:

On the ebb tide beach / everything I pick up / is alive.

I typed that from memory btw. I don’t need to look it up. Those lines…

I was talking with a poet friend the other day (the wonderful Natalie Shaw whose collection Dirty Martini was just published) about how sometimes you read a book or see a play and it hits you like a truck with a sense of something big, ungraspably big, right there but also just outside your reach. Jerusalem on stage with Mark Rylance, that was one. The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth we both agreed was another.

That haiku. That, for me. It’s huge. I don’t even know if I could articulate why it hit me so hard. Possibly you’re looking at it thinking, ‘…and?’ But those lines have been my talisman for a very long time, through the funerals of loved ones and in times of grief or bleakness, and at moments of wonder too. Because to me it says everything about time and timelessness and life and loss and solitude and presence, all wrapped up in a handful of syllables. (Yes it’s a translation, I can’t know the impact of the original. It’s by Fukuda Chiyo-ni, a Japanese woman of the Edo period who is considered one of the supreme masters of the haiku form.)

Park that a moment.

So I’m doing quite a lot of talky stuff at the moment because of my ~*~NEW BOOK COMING OUT~*~. (The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, 7^th March, since you ask.) I just did a panel discussion run by the wonderful Portal Bookshop in York for Queer History Month, with AL Lester and Lex Croucher, and two questions happened.

One was, Have you got any favourite research nuggets?

I can talk about this stuff for hours, and I probably did. I love the little details. Pretty much every book I write has something or other that I picked up as I read around the subject. (Russian jewels were smuggled out of the country post-Revolution hidden in chocolate, as a means by which the Bolsheviks avoided embargoes. The Victorians often kept hedgehogs in their kitchens to eat blackbeetles. Caddis fly larvae make themselves cases out of sand, shells, small rocks, etc, and will make them out of gold and jewels if that’s what you give them. Napoleon pushed for the domestic development of sugar beet to break the British stranglehold on sugar supply from plantations. The paint colour mummy brown was made from actual Egyptian mummies.) You might call it deeply plot relevant and fascinating social history, you might call it trivia, but I accrete it like, er, a caddis fly larva making a case, because God and the devil both dwell in the details. In the little bits and pieces that make history pop into the present, or briefly shift our perspective, or show a snapshot of a different life. In the atomic-sized parts that make a whole.

Another question, this time from an audience member: How do you create chemistry between characters?

That’s a large question with a million answers. Mine was specificity. For me, the chemistry comes when one person really sees another. Noticing how they look when they concentrate or when they’re miles away, the snag tooth or the scars on a hand, a turn of phrase, a coping strategy, an expertise in action, a moment of kindness or courage or vulnerability. (My husband does a kind of sideways-jawed yawn. When our daughter was a baby, she yawned exactly like that, such that 15 years on, I still see my baby yawn every time my husband does, and I love them both. Specificity.)

So I did the panel, and then I headed off to the theatre, running over the discussion in my head as I walked because I’m always convinced I said something unforgivably terrible or blurted out my credit card details. And I was thinking about those two questions and my closely related answers. Details. Specificity. How, if you’re looking, properly looking, like Howard Carter, you see wonderful things.

Terry Pratchett’s marvellous Carpe Jugulum, which has everything to say about religion and belief and living morally in a mostly amoral world, has a set of vampires who train themselves to be immune to the usual vampire-slaying devices, including becoming contemptuously familiar with a wide range of religious symbols. A slight shift of perspective means the vampires reach a horrified realisation:

“Everywhere I look, I see something holy!”

(and thus they’re doomed, because Pratchett knew what was what.)

We see holiness—wonderful things—everywhere, if we only look. Because life is everywhere, although time passes, and babies age, and people and things and ways go and are forgotten. No, not ‘though’. Because the tide is always going out. If we were vampires, if we had all the time in the world, it wouldn’t matter, but in the fleeting, floating world, we need to appreciate the moments, the details, as they fly. That was what Edo period haiku was about: catching the moment in transient, tiny, specific observations that nevertheless resonate through time like bells. Carpe Jugulum means ‘go for the throat’ but it’s also a riff on carpe diem for a good reason. Its confused priest doesn’t find his answers in theology, but by doing the right thing, right now. By seeing holiness everywhere, because God (for your personal and quite possibly non-religious value of god) is in the details.

I don’t know if all this means anything to you who are reading this. I’m still working on it myself. But I do know this much, and I know it matters in daily life as much as when I’m writing history or chemistry:

On the ebb tide beach / everything I pick up / is alive.

Oh God I’ve earwormed myself for a week, and probably you too. Sorry about that.

I was spurred to write this by a) my MS starting to runneth over, and b) a thread on Twitter where someone commented on the need to cut her 140K romance novel (gaaak). The advice given included:

Don’t cut it! Every word is precious!
Divide it into two books.
Cut ‘really’ and ‘very’ and the odd speech tag, that’ll definitely take out 60K.

(Let me just say, if you’re going to take writing advice off the internet, and you probably are because you’re reading this, in the name of God don’t take it off Twitter.)

So what do we do with an over-long book? Well, the first question is:

Does my book need to be this long?

I haven’t read it, but I’m happy to say no anyway. Very, very few long books need to be that long. OK, A Suitable Boy or Middlemarch or Sacred Games or London Belongs to Me, but what you need to ask yourself is, am I in fact a Dickensian level genius depicting entire inner and outer worlds with the sweep of my pen, or did I just go on a bit?

If you can maintain your vibrant narrative drive and pacing, plot interest, characterisation and energy levels, doubtless the reader will be carried along. If, however, you have sufficient plot for an average romance novel, but you feel like you need twice as many words to tell it, ask yourself why.

But KJ, it’s necessary character development and the careful delineation of their growing relationship!

OK but 140K of ‘twenty-eight times they went to the coffee shop and talked’ belongs at AO3 or Wattpad. (That isn’t a criticism: I think it is glorious that there are people who want to write 140K character studies, and people who want to read them, and a place where both sets of people can meet.) If you want to try for romance trad publication, you need your book to fall within the pretty wide parameters of the genre. A modern category romance is maybe 50-60K, a contemporary tradpub is more like 70-90K. Historicals tend to run a bit longer. The publisher will have guidelines.

If you’re planning to self pub you can of course do what you want. But if you’re charging people money, you still need to be honest with yourself as to whether you have a big book or just a bloated book.

So how do we deal with an oversized book? Well, the best advice I have is:

Don’t write one.

The best point to prevent yourself being stuck with a wildly overlong book is before you’ve typed out all those words. As you write, check in on where you are in the wordcount vs where you are in the story. If you’re writing a contemporary romance and you’re at 70K but only a quarter into your plot, you’ve messed up.

We have all found ourselves trapped in a Scene That Never Ends. (Yes it goes on and on, my friend. Some people started writing it not knowing what it was, but people keep writing it just because…) I recall a writer friend screaming, “Help, I’m trapped in a sequence of Two Men Having a Curry and I can’t get out!” The trick is to realise you aren’t going anywhere before you’ve spent a month in there.

(It would doubtless be possible to write an entire romance novel of Two Men Having a Curry as a single scene in which they fall in love over the meal. Actually that sounds brilliant, someone do it. But if it’s a scene in a book, it needs to be scene length, not book length.)

***

OK. Suppose you didn’t listen to me and you’ve accidentally written a 140K romance. What to do?

Divide it

Sometimes you do indeed need more than one standard book’s worth of words. My Will Darling Adventures is a trilogy because I could never have got Will and Kim to a HEA in a single 80K book. That said, it was planned as a trilogy from the start and each part has a clearly defined romance arc that comes to a satisfactory-for-now conclusion plus a separate external plot with an ending. It’s three books. That’s not the same as one book in three parts.

If your story is genuinely tightly constructed, and every scene contributes, and the relationship is moving forward all the time, dividing it into two may be a sensible choice. But each should have a real break point, and a real ending. Nobody likes a two-part story where the first part simply stops, rather than actually finishing. Moreover, if part 1 stops at a cliffhanger or a breakup, you are liable to annoy romance readers something chronic. The promise of romance is a satisfactory ending and if you don’t deliver without warning, some readers will happily click ‘next book’, but many others will click ‘one star’. So think very hard about how you’re going to work this. And if you do decide to sell a single story in two halves, make it clear in your marketing. Readers are open to all sorts of things as long as they are given fair warning.

Cut it!

Right. /cracks knuckles/

For a start, you are not going to lose 60K of bloat by trimming adverbs and speech tags. You are going to need garden shears, not thinning scissors. Here’s what to look for.

Losable characters

Do you have three sassy best friends where one could fulfil all the necessary plot function? Do we need to meet the heroine’s whole extended family? What is the cute kid or the guest appearance by the last book’s hero actually for?

In an ideal world, every aspect of your novel serves multiple functions. It keeps a story tight and makes it feel woven together and satisfying. If a character in your novel serves only one plot function, that sounds to me like a character whose job could be given to someone else. (That is, if you have a neighbourly auntie who gives wise advice and an office lady who helps cover for the heroine’s boardroom sex sessions, give the office lady the advice role and lose the auntie.) Make every character earn their place.

If you have sequel bait characters for the next book who aren’t earning their keep as secondary characters in this book, rethink. I recently read a romance novel (first of a different-MCs trilogy) where all four MCs from the next two books hung around the plot like leather-jacketed extras in Grease, offering comic banter and moral support from the sidelines. They could all have been cut without affecting the story in the slightest, losing an easy 15K and allowing us to actually get into the romance without the constant interruption slowing it to a glacial pace. Sequel bait characters should make you want the next book. Do I sound like I want the next book?

Ask yourself: Would this character’s removal materially affect the development of the plot or character arcs? What role does this person play? (If the answer is “comic relief”, do us all a solid and get the axe.) (Yes, I’m grumpy.)

Losable scenes

If you cut this scene, would the book still work? If not, just how much of this scene would you have to keep? If it’s five lines, cut the scene and find another place for those five lines to go.

Every scene needs to earn its keep, and as above, ideally it needs to do multiple jobs. If you have a scene in which the MCs are discussing the break-in at the cupcake factory, and a scene where they trade sexy banter over cupcakes, how about amping up the discussion scene with sexual tension instead, thus doing both at once?

Beware multiple endings. If you’ve seen the final Lord of the Rings film with its SIX ENDINGS ACROSS FORTY-FIVE MINUTES MOTHER OF GOD you will know what I mean, but books do this too. Granted it can be hard to say goodbye to your characters, but believe me, you find it a lot harder than the reader will. Do you actually need an epilogue where they’ve got a baby? How about saving it for a newsletter bonus scene?

Stuckness

One characteristic of very long romance novels is often a sense of, for want of a better word, stuckness. The MCs spend chapter after chapter circling over the same thoughts about how they can’t imagine the other one would ever fancy them/can’t possibly fancy their best friend’s little sister, or repeating the same pattern of interaction (they go out, they get on, one of them says something snarky, they go off in a huff…). If your MCs are in a loop of that kind, break it. Each scene needs to advance the relationship, not just tell us more about the same thing.

I will here, once again, quote the best editorial comment I have ever received: “This passage feels like you are explaining the plot to yourself.” Watch out for this, it’s an incredibly common cause of bloat (especially in my first drafts). Here ‘plot’ also applies to conflict. If the heroine is repeatedly explaining to herself or others how she Can Never Trust Again because of her ex, make sure you’ve established that properly in the first place and then demonstrate how it works and changes, rather than filling the page with perseverating thoughts.

Repeated elements

I recently read a SF novel which is over 900 pages long, and of which the last half is, basically, the same two scenes played out in different forms over and over and over again. Could we not.

Want to show one MC standing up for the other? Do it—once. If you feel the need to do it more often, why? How do you differentiate the scenes—not just superficially, but what they achieve and the effects on the other MC/the relationship/the antagonists? Does the second time have a meaningfully different outcome? Could you get the same effect by writing the one scene a bit better?

See above for losable characters, watching out for multiple best friends, multiple antagonists, multiple amusing customers or relatives. Also, please have an entire post on various forms of repetition to look out for.

***

It is of course hard to let go words you’ve laboured over. If it makes you feel better to put them into a folder with a promise you’ll use them later, by all means do (and then forget about it). But it is worth considering which you’d rather read in a review:

I wish this book had been twice as long!
I wish this book had been half as long.

Just saying.

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen comes out 7^th March and is definitely exactly as long as it needs to be. Probably. Argh.

The Ebb Tide Beach: a meditation

What do you do when your book is too long? (Would you stand up and walk out on me?)