Humongous!

by Russell Dyer

published: jun 9, 2018; revised: jun 9, 2018; readers in past month: 347

First Printing is Huge

When I finished the first draft of my novel, I uploaded it to printer’s site and ordered one copy to see how it looks. It’s huge. With the story and other pages, it’s about 600 pages. It will be much shorter when I finish revising it, but it’s still amazing that I wrote this much.

For comparison, I included some other books in this photo. You can see it’s as thick as Joyce’s novel, Ulysses — but not as tall. It makes my other two novels on the right look like booklets.

I included a copy of Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter. He’s one of my favorite authors. It’s one of his longest novels at about 270 pages. He wrote one of my favorite novels in less than 300 pages.

Some stories require more pages. Length and brevity alone don’t make for quality. The thing is that this is actually two novels bound together. The two plots are intertwined. One is about 40% of the book and the other 60%. That means about 240 pages for one and 360 pages for the other. In that sense, it’s not very long. Still, I need to reduce the length and condense the story and improve the writing quality. I’ll cut at least 100 pages.