My novel is shrinking!

I think it's because Girlfriend isn't here this weekend, and I don't have anyone to look busy for, that I've done such prodigious procrastinating these last two days. I came into the weekend with three hours of writing to do and have only just, only now, starting it, at 6 o'clock on Sunday evening. Some days this situation might bother me; tonight I feel pretty writerly.

Self-indulgence can be energizing or enervating. Most recently I've been indulging myself by reading about writing again--this time reading The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. Reading about how to write is a drug for the aspiring writer--so I suspect--but it's a stimulant, and my system has been clear of it more or less since I set down my Orson Scott Card writing books last year, so it packs a kick. With any luck I can ride it past the end of this post.

One point that Keyes makes is that good writing is clear. He does not go quite so far as to say--but he comes close to saying--that writing well is as easy as thinking something interesting and then communicating it in words.

I'd been rediscovering this myself as I edit Hengist and Undine again, for what I once again hope is the last time. My last edit did not go well, as I confessed at the time, and I put it aside for a good while, and accomplished some things in the interim. But I think at least part of what went wrong last time was that I spent my time embellishing the words on the page, rather than improving my communication of the story. I had inadvertently turned it into a book about words.

As I've been editing, I've been remembering what's actually happening in the book--or what should be happening. I've been paring away some of my lexical and syntactic indulgences. In a few places, and all places I am pleased with so far, I have expanded on scenes, fleshing things out where time has "revealed" more about the characters and cultures of my story. I had hoped that this might happen more often, and my book (then 88,000 words long) would expand like it did from its first rewrite (from a mere 50,000 words) to assume a respectable epic heft. Instead I find that nearly everything, at this point, is mostly improved by shortening.

To my horror, the draft has been gradually shrinking in spite of my efforts to bolster it. A third of the way into the draft, the manuscript is a little over 1,000 words shorter, in spite of the addition of at least that much new material.

I realize that part of what frightens me is that as my book creeps steadily closer in length to The Last Unicorn than Knife of Dreams, I expect more to be expected of me. Who do I think I am, asking people to buy my skinny little book? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Ezra Pound? Of course such anxiety is foolish and insulting to everyone involved. And if the leaders in my weight class are too light on their feet for me, the solution certainly isn't to pack on fat until I can enjoy more sluggish competition--no doubt that is an invitation for the worst kind of percussive enlightenment.

So I expect that Hengist and Undine, when it is finished, will be 85,000 words long.