Cowboy Confessional

A recent review of AFTERLIFE said (and I paraphrase) “I wish the book was longer.”

AFTERLIFE is a novella, and thus condemned to abbreviated stature. It is novella length for one simple reason: that was all it took to tell the story well. I’m loathe mindlessly padding stories in order make it novel length and thus attractive to publishers, though not more attractive to readers.

Many writers succumb to their padded sells. My favorite writer, Robert Heinlein, only fell victim to this literary disease once or twice. When he did I always felt cheated. One Heinlein book, padded more thickly than a teenage girl’s bra, was little more than an opening chapter, a closing chapter, and 300 pages of backfill.

Fill not! It hurts your readers and eventually it hurts you … sometimes.

I had these thought ricocheting in my alleged mind while rapidly reading he early chapters of John Grisham’s THE LAST JUROR. I have never read Grisham before, not out of any distain aside from my glow-in-the-dark jealously for obscenely rich writers. It had never occurred to me to read Grisham simply his themes are ones to which I have no strong attachment. But a family member bought me a copy of JUROR for a present, and I grabbed it while heading off the bar one night.

The man makes fill taste good.

Perhaps my analysis is premature, having ingested only the first 100 pages (386 to go). The story is well constructed with little literary flotsam. Around page 80 he diverges into a detailed account of meeting a character, discussing the appearance of her house and garden, his gastronomic indifferences, her Southern cuisine and his newfound gluttony. Ten pages of prose that may add to the story later on, but which was mostly fill.

It is magnificent fill. It added texture, amplifying aspects of the town in which the book is set and the ‘outsider’ protagonist’s journey through it. Nine of those ten pages could have gone away and not affected your understanding of the plot, but they are not wasted because they are a well cooked accent, like a fine parfait after six courses.

There is fulfillment and there is landfill. If you need to pad a book, make the added prose descriptive and simultaneously wrapped around the characters (and think of towns, animals and other non-human elements as characters). Use it to deepen the relationship your reader has with those people and places that drive the story. These won’t be empty words that waste your audience’s time and patience.

Bookmark to:

My novella Afterlife seems pretty lively.  Litblog reviews have started to come in, with one today that was positively glowing.  Lupa at Pagan Book reviews wrote about Afterlife:

I think I just found one of the best works of fiction I’ve been sent since I started this review blog-and I’ve reviewed everything from self-published works to mass-marketed offerings from major publishing houses. In just over 100 pages, Guy Smith managed to captivate me with a story that grabbed me more firmly than most of the novels I’ve read-and that takes talent.

… The nature and experience of being a ghost, the limitations being dead gives you in this world, and even pondering what the true nature of the Light in this fictional Universe is, are all explored in the context of a fast-paced, gripping plotline. Make no mistake-it’s a highly streamlined book, and every word counts for a lot.

I think where the author has his greatest strength is in the running commentary that his first-person protagonist offers. Dialogue in general can be really tough to make believable, but Smith hits it dead-on, if you’ll forgive the pun. Not only was I emotionally engaged in the travails and experiences of a snarky dead guy, but the ending just wrenched the hell out of my heart. This writer’s good at what he does, let me tell you. …

… I would strongly recommend Afterlife. It has a lot going for it on multiple levels of awesome.

Late last month Amberkatze opined about Afterlife:

The Afterlife is a subject people can argue about forever and certain people have their own certain views on how the afterlife works. In this short story Guy Smith has give us yet another fresh alternative look on the afterlife and given it a little humour and alot of ghosts.

The little twists and turns in the story kept me reading and finding out how things really ‘end’ also make me want to read to the last word. There is something for everyone in Afterlife and it made for a nice quick read. In a whole it left me hoping that if there is an Afterlife, hopefully it will be a little like the one in this story.

More to come as there are copies in circulation to other litblogs and mainline reviewers.

Bookmark to: