by Catherine Dilts
Gardens need to be weeded. So does fiction.
My garden is in a wild state of growth. There are only six
weeks left until fall, and plants are hustling to produce seeds.
The weeds are in high gear, as anxious to propagate
themselves as the tomatoes, peppers, and greens.
After a rain is an excellent time to pull weeds. The soil is
softer. I’m less likely to damage the roots of the plants I want, as I remove
the plants I don’t want. A weed is a plant that doesn’t belong in a particular
area. If I plant lettuce, I don’t want it competing for sun, soil nutrients,
and water with marigolds.
While I was on my hands and knees, delicately removing
unwanted grass from a vegetable bed, I thought about how weeding words, scenes,
even chapters, from a novel is a similar process. You don’t want to rip out the
good stuff along with the bad.
I tend to write long. I love lengthy novels. I’m sure I’m
not the only reader who does. At the 2024 Pikes Peak Writers Conference, I
learned the economic reason why you see so few novels over 400 pages. Printing
costs.
Even though many readers consume literature on e-readers
where paper costs have no effect, the publisher knows a certain percentage of
hardcopy books will be printed. The high cost of paper makes the printing and
pricing of books a problem.
My publisher Encircle confirmed this when they told their
authors the sweet spot for a novel is 90,000 words. More than 100,000 is
unlikely to get published. Not because of the quality of the writing or whether
the story is compelling or not, but for harsh economic factors. Printing costs.
Kind of like when you have limited garden space. You can’t
afford to let the weeds run riot when you’re trying to get a crop of tomatoes
to grow. Those weeds compete with the domesticated plants.
We have one garden plot we’re considering converting to a
flower bed. We let it lie fallow this year, and the weeds took over. I had
extra cucumber plants this spring, so I stuck a couple in this bed. When I got
around to checking on them a few weeks ago, I was surprised they were
surviving.
Then I took a closer look. Hidden among the weeds were
healthy cucumber vines, and one cucumber. That’s when I got busy weeding around
the plant. I might as well give it a fighting chance.
I use that approach with my fiction. Sometimes I need to
take a shovel and a hoe to the mess I’ve made. Other times, I use a delicate
hand to weed out the excess words, the blathering and repetition, to get at buried
gems.
By carefully weeding out our writing, we can reveal hidden
treasures to readers.
