The Trouble With Telling a Story Too Well

I recently received feedback from a literary agent who had read my query for The Better Son. The problem wasn't the premise or the characters. It was the length.

At 57,000 words, the manuscript was too short for its genre.

My first reaction was that 57,000 words seemed like a perfectly respectable number of words. I'd written the book, after all. The story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The characters made choices, things happened, and those choices had consequences. What more did a novel need?

As it turns out, quite a bit.

I've written thrillers before. In that world, pace is king. Keep the story moving. Give the reader a reason to turn the page. If a scene doesn't advance the plot, question whether it belongs. Internal monologue is fine, but too much of it can bring a story to a halt.

I carried some of those habits into The Better Son.

The problem is that this isn't really a thriller. It's a family saga, and I'm hoping it will find a home as an upmarket novel. The crime in the story matters, but it's not the whole story. What interests me more is what happens to people when they get close to it: what it does to their

relationships, how they justify their decisions, and how the consequences follow them home.

Those things take time.

A character can make a terrible decision in a sentence. Understanding why he made it—and what it costs him—may take several pages. The same is true of a marriage, a rivalry between brothers, or a family grievance that has been simmering for decades.

In a thriller, I might move quickly past the moment when a character realizes he's crossed a line. In a family saga, that moment may be the scene.

So I've gone back into the manuscript.

I'm about a third of the way through a substantial rewrite, working to add emotional depth rather than simply more words. I'm spending more time inside the characters' heads, exploring the tensions between what they say and what they think, and allowing important moments to breathe instead of rushing toward the next event.

It's a different kind of writing. Also a different kind of editing.

The temptation is to add material. More scenes, more dialogue, more description. But length for its own sake is just padding, and nobody needs another 20,000 words of padding.

The real question is what I've left out.

Sometimes it's a reaction that comes a beat too late. Sometimes it's a memory that changes the meaning of a conversation. Sometimes a character needs to sit with the consequences of a decision instead of immediately moving on to the next problem.

And sometimes the most important thing is what a character doesn't say.

I'm discovering that the challenge isn't to slow the story down. It's to let the reader experience more of it.

There's a certain irony in this. I spent years learning to eliminate unnecessary words. Now I'm going back to see whether, in my determination to keep the story moving, I've eliminated some necessary ones.

The agent's feedback gave me a reason to look at the manuscript differently. I don't know yet where the final word count will land, and I'm not going to add words simply to reach a target. The book has to earn every page.

But I'm beginning to see opportunities I missed before. The story is still the same. The characters are still the same. What I'm trying to change is how deeply the reader gets to know them.

That's the work for now.

Apparently, finishing a novel doesn't always mean you're finished with it.