Yay for austerity - Nick Green

'Cuts must be fast and deep!' - George Osborne

They do say that if you want a lot of buzz around your blog, then it helps to be controversial. How am I doing? Luckily for me I’m currently out of the country, having written this well in advance before jetting off to the relative safety of… well, I won’t say where I’m on holiday, but at least it’s not a tax haven.

This isn’t the place for politics, but although it’s fair to say that the Chancellor and I don’t have many points of agreement, there is one topic where we see absolutely eye to eye – and that is the need for cuts. The one small difference is that he likes to do it to the places that keep books, i.e. libraries, whereas I prefer to do it in the books themselves.

The weirdest thing about reading on an e-reade– no, I’m going to call it a Kindle, it’s quicker - the odd thing about reading on a Kindle is that you don’t have a clear sense of how long a book is, or how close you are to the end. There’s the progress bar of course, but it’s no substitute for palpable weight and thickness. A friend of mine finished Bleak House and had no idea what an arm-breaker it was till she saw my paper copy. Arguably, this new insubstantial format gives writers more freedom to pen longer and longer tomes, now there are no pressures from printing costs or osteopaths. Even children’s writers such as moi, repeatedly begged by editors to keep things short and snappy, can wave Kindles like a license to err on the side of the Harry Potters.

But there’s a reason why ‘No Limit’ by 2Unlimited is one of the worst songs ever released. (Remember it? It goes ‘No no, no no-no no, no no-no no, no-no THERE’S NO LIMIT’ and that’s the good bit.) Because limits are the very channels of creativity.

Having strayed by pure chance into pop territory, let’s take the music album. There’s something right, natural-seeming, even divinely ordained, about the 45-minute album format. Yet this is merely an accident of technology – 45 minutes was the most you could squeeze onto a vinyl LP without losing the sound quality. Later, when CDs came along, bands started going for hour-long albums, but we weren’t fooled and we skipped the extra 15 minutes of duff tracks. Removing the limits just revealed the limitations.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but being forced to conform to an arbitrary set of limits is a good thing. Creativity is like gunpowder – it only goes bang in a confined space. Without their rigid constraints, haikus and sonnets would no longer be delicate crystalline wonders, they’d just be la-di-da. Or just take a look at Twitter – love it or loathe it, there’s a definite art to expressing oneself unambiguously in the space of 140 charac

When I finished the third book in my Cat Kin trilogy, my editor worried at how much longer it was than the preceding volumes – part of it was about wanting all three to look neat on the bookshelf. Editors are idiots, aren’t they? Or so I thought, for a couple of days. And then I gritted my teeth and I cut 10,000 words from a book I’d already cut by 11,000 from its first draft, taking out an entire chapter in the process. I’m still fond of that chapter. But my editor was right – the book was miles better without it.

Cutting bad bits is something everyone can understand. What’s harder to get your head around is cutting good bits. That chapter I took out of Cat’s Cradle – let me tell you, it was nail-biting stuff. But I had to cut something, and that one took the hit. Because all the other contenders for cutting were more necessary to the book as a whole.

When the Lord of the Rings films were all the rage, my Tolkien-obsessed friends and I used to play a game. Fed up with people complaining about what Peter Jackson had cut from the cinematic releases to save for the extended DVDs, we made some rules. You could choose one scene from an Extended Edition to put back into the cinematic version – but you had to take out an existing scene to make room for it.

So you could keep Merry and Pippin getting drunk on Entwash, but it might force out Arwen’s back story; or you could lose some of the battle scenes to keep Saruman in film 3 (Peter Jackson cut Christopher Lee! Now that’s badass editing). If you love those films, have a go – it’s surprisingly hard.
 

'Eat hellfire, Jackson!'

 

That’s why I’m wary of ebooks and their theoretically Tardis-like dimensions. If space constraints are forcing you to cut, you are forced to choose what’s more important. It’s no good saying it’s all important. You can still compare and judge and rank. Come on! It’s a fire, and you have to choose between your children. (Obviously, you choose the one with the straighter teeth and the greater future earning potential.) By being a hostage to impossible decisions – by being forced to cut to the bone – you end up with what you consider to be the truly indispensable things. In the political world, that might be the NHS and libraries, or it might be moats and duck houses. In the world of your book, it’s the difference between a good story and a great one.

Nick Green
Follow me on Twitter at @nickgreen90125