Many novels are just too damn long! Anything above 90k words is just rambling and masturbatory.

>>24546708 (OP)
This is poor bait, even for this board

>>24546708 (OP)
Novel idea: The letter A
It repeats A 89999 times. That's something OP would read cause it represents his ideal novel.

>>24546708 (OP)
This is probably just bait but I sort of believe it. I’ve read lots of doorstoppers and rarely do I feel like they add something a book half the size does. Even worse still, a lot of 200 page books pack punches that 350 pages can’t compete with.
Length is a crutch for the author. You get “more” so it must be better. Same as with all those movies creeping up to 2.5 hours or even beyond. They don’t have more to say than a shorter work. It’s filler. It’s stretching. It’s the illusion of density by just making a bigger pile. The pile is made of cotton candy. Sweet but disappears once you try to bite into it.

Disagree? Mention some giant books that genuinely could not have been trimmed down to half the size.

>>24546708 (OP)
Long, encyclopedic novels >>>

>>24546708 (OP)
>Many novels are just too damn long!
I agree. (Partly because many novels should be of length zero words.)

>Anything above 90k words is just rambling and masturbatory.
‘Anything’ is too strong.

There are certainly many novels that could do with going on a diet, and far fewer that need feeding up. How often do you finish a book and think "great, but I wish it had been 50 pages longer!" Not often. (Sometimes you enjoy being in the world so much you don't want it to end, but even then, usually you accept the book was the right length.)


A book I think is clearly too long: For Whom The Bell Tolls. It needs to lose 50-100 pages. Take out a few little diversions altogether (like following the gypsy when he goes and delivers the message. No-one cares.) Then trim every single other scene by about 20%. That'll do it.

>>24547540
I agree with this.

>movies creeping up to 2½ hours plus
This especially. Hollywood used to be able to tell a story well in 90 minutes.

Orson Welles talks quite a bit about brevity, in theatre and cinema. When he did the Mercury theatre they almost always cut texts down and did them very fast. He said no-one ever complained they weren't getting their money's worth.

There are lots of reasons for the creeping bloat. One is that "prestigious" films tend (or tended) to be longer. (Some survey a few years ago showed, IIRC, that a Best Picture Oscar winner averages 20 minutes longer than the average film of that year.)

So in the 1940s / 50s, the average film was 90 minutes or a bit over, and the Oscar winners were more around the 2 hour mark. Everyone notices this, consciously or not, and thinks "longer = better, so if we make our film longer, it will be better".

Another reason is that the most famous directors have more power now.

Under the studio system, the directors, even if they were very well-respected, were still just a cog in a machine. They didn't have final cut. So the producer would just say "lose 20 minutes" and the editors would cut 20 minutes. It led to some very bad things (The Magnificent Ambersons) but on the whole I think it was beneficial. (The ugly fact about film is that the "director's cut" is almost always worse than the theatrical release.)

Nowadays a famous director can be as self-indulgent as he wants and no-one can tell him no. A good example: compare the 1933 King Kong with the Peter Jackson version. PJ was all-powerful in 2005, because of Lord of the Rings, and no-one had the power to take his film and throw away the hour of it that needed throwing away.

>>24546832
I looked it up one time, curious.
80k, is considered standard novel length.
90k is no stretch at all, over the minimum length attributed to be called "novel".
>
In high school, my literature teacher gave us extra points if we read a book from her little library. Me and a couple friend had to read James A Michener's "Space". Well over a thousand pages and then like a regular sized novel? After the 1000. Liked it. Wasn't the most exciting thing ever, but it was okay. Michener? Breaking the thousand page mark opened me up later, to King.
>
The truth is, there is no minimum nor maximum length rule. Stretching out a 300 pages at best novel, into over a thousand? Would be silly. But, it would be equally silly to take a 1200 page decent story, and edit it down to 225 pages.
The novel? Will be as short or as long, as it needs to be.

>>24547654
>1200 page decent story
Name one