If I knew then what I know now — I’m talking about book publishing here — and by then, I mean when I had an idea about writing a novel — I might have thought seriously about choosing a different medium to tell the story I wanted to tell.
Because the story is the thing. That story is Young Ireland, a revolutionary group in Ireland’s history whose contributions to Irish culture have been subsumed by their less than stellar results on the battlefield. Relegated to a footnote in Irish history books, with absolutely no name recognition among the average Irish citizen, I came up with the brilliant idea that if I wrote a really good fictional story about Young Ireland, EVERYONE would want to read it. And if they did that, they’d find out what I admire so much about them — tireless fighters for Ireland’s independence, great believers in liberty and freedom and universal property rights, including the right to self-defense.
The only thing this grand idea needed was for me to write a good book, good enough to land an agent, who, in turn, would land me a publisher, and the book would jump off the bookstore shelves (as you can tell, I am big on the power of positive thinking).
Books might have jumped off the shelves 30 years ago, but now they are a click away on Amazon. And back then, when books weren’t Kindles, we could get lost in meaty tomes — the War and Peaces of the world — and gobble them up. But nowadays, publishers don’t publish meaty, unless you can cook it up in less than 300 pages (an impossibility). I didn’t know that then.
So back then I set about writing a great big meaty book. I was 375 pages (or in book writerly terms, 150,000 words) in — a quarter of the way through the story — when I attended my first historical novel conference, and for the first time, I learned about this “we don’t want meat” trend in publishing. They wanted 100,000 words from me, and if I couldn’t produce, then they didn’t want me. No matter how great the story was.
Something had to give. That something being words. I went on to finish writing the book, which, after some severe cuts, came to 250,000 words, then after another slash and burn, down to 221,000 words, then 191,000. That’s where it stood in June this year, when I attended my second historical novel conference, where I (and everyone else in attendance) was repeatedly told that it had to get down to 120,000 words max for anyone in the industry to even consider it. It’s a paper thing. The bottom line is paper costs a lot and publishers can’t afford to print “War and Peace” anymore.
So, I came home from the conference and returned to slash and burn mode once more. It’s four months later, and I’ve got it down to 126K. Which is seemingly huge, right? But one problem: It came with a huge gutting of Young Ireland’s story. Since the whole point of me writing this book is to tell the Young Ireland story, I have somehow got to figure out how to squish that story back in while simultaneously cutting 6,000 words.
I don’t know how that works, but I am determined to find out. I’ll keep you posted.
Our musical interlude this week, Otis Redding …
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