BEING A WRITER

Last month, I had a week of being made a fuss of. Flown halfway around the world. Media interviews. Sound and video recordings. Photographs. People regarding me as if I were important, asking questions and listening to what I had to say. The odd bit of flattery.

It was all in aid of selling a book.

Personally, I prefer the book to the author in most cases. This whole phenomenon of the author as public figure makes me uncomfortable, never more so than when I am that author.Never before, a publisher told me, has the persona of the writer been so important. These days people apparently want to know about the person behind the book.

Before heading off on this book tour, I was expressing these doubts to my 16-year-old daughter who understands the world a lot better than I do. She cut me short: “Listen! You’re there to sell your book. Not to talk about your vulnerabilities and be boring.”

Not being one to argue with the wisdom of a teenager, I took that as my mantra on my travels. Rather than kvetch about what I was doing, I was determined to enjoy it. And I did.

Writing is such a lonely business, with so few external rewards, that being patted on the back and seeing my book on a best-seller shelf was a thrill.

Good as it was, though, it wasn’t writing. That lonely business, the groping for words while staring at the page or screen, is its own reward. Some of us could not exist without it. Neither could the business of publishing and bookselling.

Why are books that should be 60 pages long so often 600 pages long, asks author Sam Harris in a recent article. He did so only in passing while building another argument, but it’s a matter worth some consideration.

Harris’s answer is that publishers need the books longer, so they can sell them for more. The suggestion is that there is some practicality about book production that makes it economically attractive to have longer books. But what happens to this justification when you’re dealing with ebooks? And should works of art really be shoehorned into specific preset formats?

The latter question forms the premise of a little known but most worthwhile book by crime writer Charles Willeford. The Woman Chaser is about a man who has a bolt of inspiration and makes a movie that everyone who sees it agrees is a masterpiece.

The problem is it’s 60 minutes long. When he goes to the film distribution companies, they insist he adds 30 minutes to get it to feature film length. When he goes to the TV channels, they insist he cuts 10 minutes or so from it to make it fit into an hour slot with time for ad breaks.

Realising that both these options will destroy his film, the filmmaker sets fire to the only print. As a tragic ending for a book, it rates for me not far below the suicide of the title character in Jack London’s Martin Eden.

While perhaps not as rigid, preset formats exist in the world of books too. Upon hearing that I have a new book in the works, I was once asked if it was going to be “another novella or a proper book”. The supposed novella the speaker referred to was Nobody Dies, which at close on 70,000 words strikes me as being of respectable length for a book of its kind.

My editor at Random House, my publisher at the time, suggested that I aim for 80,000 words in future. Apparently that is how long readers expect crime books to be these days. By contrast, the pulp fiction of 50 or so years ago averaged around 55,000 words only. I have read a great many of those books and never once felt cheated that the book was too short. In fact, I didn’t even realise that they were shorter than today’s equivalents.

I’d like to avoid the hard choices involved in choosing my ten all-time favourite novels, but if I ever do, I’m confident that among them will be at least two very short books. In the edition I have, Vladimir Nabokov’s The Eyeruns to 92 pages, in an above average font size. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, undoubtedly one of the great novels in world literature, is little over 50,000 words long, as is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

One can only hope that with the growth of ebooks, the paradigms that paper publishers seem to favour will become irrelevant and that it will be possible for authors to publish stories of 40 pages or 4000 pages – whatever it takes to convey what it is they want to convey.

The long and short of it is that there are many short books I’d read twice before reading a book of twice that length once.