wordy
(aka, i thought it would be funny to have a newsletter about loquaciousness with a short title)
I write long books.
This is not a surprise to anyone who has read any of my books. They all clock in north of 100k. The Unexpected Everything is the longest page count - I broke 500 with that one - but I’m not actually sure it’s the longest word count. I think we started playing with fonts and line spacings after that one to keep the books under 5001.
Even my middle grade book was, by MG standards, on the long side. My friend Sarah is always pointing out that I don’t get paid by the word. And truly, with Firefly Summer, I thought I was going to write a shorter book. 60k, here I come baybee! But then, I wrote a book with five main characters and a supporting cast that totaled seventeen. And these people all had things to say, and had to argue with each other, and I had to account for where they were…and before I knew it my MG was also over 100k. (I think the final book is closer to 80? It helped that I got rid of two cousins that weren’t really adding anything.)
I’ve thought a lot about why this is. I would like to write shorter books! As my friend Rebecca points out, one of my books, word count wise, is like two of hers. I could be writing more books every year! But as a reader, I love a big book. I love feeling like I’m really in the world, that I really know these characters. I adore a subplot, dialogue that’s just there for fun, side excursions that might not add that much to the plot, but are a joy to read. I’m never complaining about a chunky book. If I love a book, I want to spend as much time there as possible.
It’s also possible that my love of a long book was determined by the fact that when I was 11 or 12 (WAY too early, in retrospect) I started devouring Stephen King, John Grisham, and VC Andrews books. None of these people wrote short novels. So maybe my story metabolism just got set long? I don’t know.
There’s also the fact that I love dialogue, and banter, and inside jokes. I love to have people chatting with each other - it’s my favorite way of figuring out who characters are and what makes them tick. Darcy & Russell, my new book out in May, has a lot of the two main characters just talking and those scenes were such a joy to write.
I also think that a lot of my characters talk around things. It takes them a lot of time, and a lot of deflecting conversation, to loop back around to what they were trying to say.
But I have been specifically thinking of this for a reason - because We Grant You A Merry Christmas, my holiday story about the Grant family, the quasi-sequel to Save the Date, is currently available to read for all of December! Click here for the story!
It’s described as a short story. But…it’s not. It is 110 pages. That is not a short story. That’s half of one of Rebecca’s novels! It has ten chapters. So not a short story, in any sense of the word. I think it’s more like a novella? But even then, it’s closer to the longer end of what makes a novella.
However long it is, though - it was exactly the length I needed it to be to tell the story I wanted. And I loved writing this story. It also has my favorite epigraph of anything I’ve ever written.
Getting to jump back into the life of the Grants was the easiest thing in the world for me. It honestly felt like they’d been waiting in the wings this whole time. I loved getting to continue the story - of Charlie, Bill, J.J., Mike, Danny, Linnie, Rodney, the Grant parents, and of course Waffles. I just put all my favorite Christmas things in here - The Family Stone and Prancer and Christmas sweaters and snow and iron-clad Christmas traditions. And for fun, I added the New Jersey turnpike and terrible facial hair and the apartment building I grew up in in NYC and gingerbread and romantic complications. It was just fun. I hope that if you get a chance to read it, you get a kick out of it2.
And in the meantime, I am hoping my next book will be shorter…but I’m not making any promises 😌.
And just as a reminder, if you want to pre-order either of my upcoming books, you can! Promchanted is out March 5th, and Darcy & Russell is out May 7th!! I should have info about upcoming events and tour dates coming in the new year.
xoxo
mm
Some people act like it is a terrible crime for a realistic contemporary novel to be this long but fantasy books are USUALLY this long or longer! And this makes me irritated! You have to world build in realistic books too, even if the world is just, you know, Connecticut. / rant over. *steps off soapbox*
There are also some easter eggs, which feels seasonally inappropriate. Kat and Stevie from Take Me Home Tonight make a cameo, and there’s also a Firefly cameo as well!