Don't Write a Big Epic Novel

Lessons from my struggle

Don’t write a big epic novel. Simply don’t. Just don’t. Do anything else you want with your life. Create a feature-rich maximalist app with all the bells and whistles. Attachment-parent a baby. Run a marathon.

All of these are better for your physical, mental, and emotional health than writing a big epic novel.

I didn’t set out to write a big epic novel

When I started writing my novel, I had a pretty tight outline of 40 neat chapters, each to be about 2000 words. But as it progressed, things just dramatically changed, and now I have 110 chapters, some of which are 7000 words long.

How did this happen?

I guess this is one of those places where curiosity kills the cat.

I’d keep writing, but my novel would feel ‘stuck’ or joyless. I’d realize I wasn’t answering the question of ‘WHY’. Why do my characters do what they do? Why should my reader care? Why does this not feel quite right?

Now, if you’re writing a normal work of fiction, you invent motives, you handwave the boring parts, you write pivotal scenes that move things to where you want them to be.

But this is fiction based off of nonfiction, and the real motives of our characters are an archive away.

Why was Savarkar sentenced to 50 years in Kalapani? Because they found a connection between him and the guns used to kill Magistrate Jackson. How did they find the connection? Because Chaturbhuj Amin and Harishchandra Koregaonkar turned. Who were they, and why did they turn? They were his friends who smuggled guns in and were caught by the Bombay police and tortured till they turned. How did the police know to look for them? Because Gopalkrishna Gokhale informed Lord Morley (who then wired Lord Minto) about the connection between Babarao Savarkar, Balgangadhar Tilak, and the bomb manual that led to the Kingsford attempted bombing. Bomb manual? Yes, Savarkar was behind that too. How? His friend Bapat infiltrated Russian anarchist circles in Paris, and got hold of one and he mass-printed them with a cyclostyler and smuggled it into India. Cyclostyler? Yes, it’s a device….. You get the picture.

I’m following the fun, and writing all that that makes the fun parts make sense, and before you know it, it’s 200,000 words that are a colossal pain to edit.

What’s wrong with a big epic novel?

The now-disgraced NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) got us to believe that if you wrote 1667 words every day for a month, you could write 50,000 words, which was the length of a novel.

Many tried, and after a few attempts and discussions with other writer friends, we realized that novels usually tend to be like 80,000 words, so it would take 2-3 months to write, not just one single month. Plus, the first draft needed a lot of editing to make it into a readable novel. The first draft is just the beginning of a process of pulling out the story your readers want to read from the story you just told yourself.

Let’s not even get into how hard it is to write 1667 words of fiction a day. Though now, with sufficient practice, I can easily write that many words in 2-3 hours a day.

So, if I’ve written 200k words, the hard part is over, right? What’s the holdup? Why is it so much harder?

The problem with a big epic novel is… there’s just a lot that happens in it. To keep all the characters, events, and subplots in order is a challenge.

There are technical tools to make this easier, but the core issue as I see it is - you can’t keep all of it in your head as you can with smaller novels.

If you can keep the entire plot of a novel in your head, you can:

• Write it on the fly.

• Aren’t consumed with anxiety about breaking something when you write something.

• You can estimate how long chapters will take to write.

• Each scene is going to be relatively straightforward to write.

• Your editing is going to be relatively straightforward because you haven’t discovered too many new things while finishing a draft.

• Research can be kept tight and bounded because there aren’t that many rabbit holes to get into.

I can’t do all of these, and so things quickly get out of hand.

The difference between a 50,000-word novel and a 200,000-word novel isn’t linear. It scales quadratically, or even cubically.

This means that you can’t iterate quickly. I find I need to get all the way through a draft before I can decide what direction to go in next - should I cut a character, or should I cut out an entire subplot, or what changes need to happen when I fiddle with a plot point? This slows things down considerably.

What I find to be my biggest challenge

This is challenging of course, but what really slows me down is that the historical sources describe something in a line, or a paragraph. When I write it, though, it ends up being several thousand words, because I need to give it depth, intrigue and joy.

Take for instance, this bit from Vikram Sampath’s book on Savarkar:

Leaving London on 15 February 1909, Amin set sail, dodging detectives and customs officials, and reached Bombay on 6 March. The parcel was delivered to Gopalrao Patankar as Hari Anant Thatte, then president of Abhinav Bharat in Maharashtra, could not be reached due to surveillance troubles. By March 1909, Amin was back in London with the news of the safe delivery of the consignment.

This took about 3500 words to write well. You’ve got to show the dodging the detectives and the customs officials. You’ve got to show the ‘surveillance troubles’. And you’ve got to make it pay off.

I’m sure a better writer than me would have written this in 1500 words that packed a punch. I’m trying to be that writer, but it takes me time to figure things out.

It doesn’t help that I generally do things slowly.

Where things stand

I said six weeks ago that I have about 100,000 words left to edit.

What’s happened then is my manuscript has ballooned by 50,000 words, and I still have 75,000 words left to edit, somehow, in 35 chapters.

I feel positively about the momentum, and creative work takes as long as it will.

It’s frustrating, but there’s very little I can do other than try to finish as well as I can.

What can I do differently?

The next time I find myself writing a novel, here’s what I’m going to do, knowing what I know about myself and writing now:

• The hard part is figuring out the emotional journey. So that’s going to be my priority. But it’s not something one can start with.

• I’d need to start with the research. Every time I come across an interesting fact or sequence, I’m going to just write a scene that highlights it, even if it isn’t connected to every other scene I’ve written.

• Once enough sources have been consulted and all the interesting scenes have been constituted, patterns will emerge. There will be a main character, and there will be an emotional journey.

• Now that that is settled, I’ll figure out how to tell that story in ten chapters. If it spills over, it’s going to be 2 books.

• I’m going to try whipping the 10 chapters into a book. I have no doubt it will inevitably turn into 30, or even 40, chapters.

• Then I get to The End in 2 months of writing, post-research.

• Profit.

Of course, I can’t predict the future. But this is a plan.

The Marketing Implications of Epic Novels

A big novel takes me more time to write, costs me more to edit… and I can’t make it cost more to the reader.

From what I hear, people aren’t willing to pay more for 500 pages versus 200 pages. 700 pages would be too intimidating for most people to read, and they wouldn’t even pick it up.

But what’s bothered me the most has been releasing it chapter by chapter.

You see, I was inspired by Andy Weir’s experience of The Martian.

Mr. Weir wrote The Martian chapter by chapter, on his blog, and started emailing his friends with a chapter whenever he finished it. Word spread. His mailing list ballooned to 3000-strong. They wanted to read it all together as a book, so he mailed them a PDF instead. And they wanted to pay him for it, so he put it on Amazon. It rose quickly to the top of the charts. A publisher wanted to publish it. And the rest is history.

But… I realized my novel is not The Martian. First off, a man stuck on Mars is a very different story than a story of how Savarkar ended up in Kalapani. When Elon Musk was starting SpaceX, he just found groups of people just interested in hanging out and talking about space for hours. This is a topic that lends itself to nerds discussing scientifically accurate ways of surviving on Mars.

Then, people’s emails weren’t full of as much crap back then, and Amazon ebooks were a new thing.

But most importantly, The Martian is only 26 chapters long. So Mr. Weir could release a chapter a month, and it was fine.

I’ve tried to release a chapter a day (given there are 110 chapters), and realized it was like drinking from a firehose.

So I’m going to take a slightly saner approach.

Beta-read my book!

I’m going to release a chapter every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday for paid subscribers. I’m going to send previews to free subscribers as well so y’all can be part of the fun too.

There are 18 chapters out, with marginalia and footnotes about how I came to write every chapter, and how much of it is fact vs pure fiction.

I hope you enjoy reading my chapters as much as I enjoy writing them. Thank you for your support and encouragement on this journey!