You get a little leeway for worldbuilding if you write science fiction and fantasy–and I do–but even in the genre most tolerant of long works, a debut fiction manuscript can’t come busting down the door at twice the expected length. (And it’s kinda frustrating that sometimes when I talk about this, people bring up the existence of successful long books, without acknowledging that they are generally penned by much more established authors. Yes, even Stephen King’s first published book was short!)
Marketability is the issue here. If you’re trying to partner with a publisher, you’re ASKING them to bring their knowhow and resources to the table to sell your book. So yes, they get to call the shots, and one of the things they believe is that young adult SFF books are ideally around 90k. It’s intimidating as hell to think I have to UN-WRITE about HALF of the book I wrote to get it to fit in those pants, but I’m gonna try to at least get close.
Some of it will be making hard choices about entire aspects that will have to be chopped. I might lose a plot line. I will definitely lose some big scenes. Then I’ll need to make smaller choices: what does each part of this book that I devoted words to DO for the story, and are there redundancies according to that? Cut ’em. Moving on from there, it’ll be reducing scenes to offscreen references or cutting them, toning up bulky language, and eventually the nitty-gritty of knocking individual words out of sentences to make them tighter.
But all that writing that gets cut still served a purpose. Some of it helped me figure out aspects of the worldbuilding that I can then be more subtle about (or not include at all). Some of it helped me figure out characters’ voices and relationships. Some of it was done as loosely as it was in the spirit of not editing myself to death while I was trying to get the story down. Some of it just turned out to not be needed, and I found that out by putting it there to be judged. But none of it is wasted, even if it does end up on the cutting room floor.
I’ll never write short first drafts. My life would be so much easier if I did, but I just don’t. And while my books can sometimes lose enough words to come out tight and smooth and presentable to the publishing industry’s expectations, I’m not going to strangle them while they’re coming out to have them start out that way. It’s like a recipe I’ve got to taste as I cook it. I think I’ll get there.
But dang, it sucks. (Readers, let me know if you want to join the test reader list for an upcoming Sapphic science fiction romance/coming-of-age novel.)