Leaving Out The Parts That People Skip

Murakami's 1Q84: Finished. And by finished I don't only mean that I finally finished the 900+ paged book, but also, that I'm through with reading any novel that touches the millennial page mark.

At the time, having never read any of Murakami's novels, such as Norwegian Wood or Kafka on the Shore, I thought it was best to read his latest novel to get a sense of the guy and his work, After hearing positive reviews for the book, I decided to dive right in.

So I spent the last three months reading Murakami's latest novel 1Q84. The end result? Well, I'm not going to review the book because I'm not going to go into why Murakami thinks it is necessary to spend pages describing skies, misshapen heads, penises and seminal fluids. Seriously, he does.

1Q84 could have been easily trimmed down to 300 or 500 pages and still get to the point, without spending hours reading through the descriptions described above. I wonder if the editor fell asleep halfway through reading this clump and just decided that it was fine just the way it was.

I'm trying to wrap my head around why novels need to be this long. Just look at one of my favorite writers of all time, Elmore Leonard, who is the epitome of a concise writer. As the man says, "I try to leave out the parts that people skip". Not only does he try, but he succeeds in every single one of his books, whether they are bad or good. 

Other writers in his genre (crime) tend to doze off in pages and pages of nonsensical descriptions. Just look at Steig Larsson with his Millennium Trilogy, but Leonard is a master at his craft and he fills each and every single one of his pages with necessary information. Leonard's latest novel, Raylan clocks in at under 300 pages and I don't need to read it to know that he leaves out all of the parts that people skip.

Why can't other writers do the same? Why do they have to fill pages that the ordinary reader will just skip?

Same goes for word count. Publishers, especially from any of the big 6 publishing houses, expect their writers to write a certain amount of words based on what genre they are writing. So if you're a Fantasy writer, they expect your book to have 200,000+ words. A young adult book should be over 100,000 words. These are antiquated rules that make the writer waste pages writing stuff that can easily be omitted, just so they could meet that word count that they are expected to reach.

The point I'm trying to make is that any genre writer shouldn't give themselves a hard time if they can't reach a certain page or word count. Remember, Rules were meant to be broken. Only because other writers are going around following these rules doesn't mean you have to. After all, that's why so many are self-publishing, so they can have complete control of their work without anyone else telling them how it's done.

To all writers out there, remember:

  Leave out the parts that people skip!