Novel novel

We got to speed the plow.

Watching a film costs between ninety and hundred and twenty minutes (or so).

Reading a novel costs a lot more time. I’m aware there are other pleasures involved – the smell, the tactile quality, the aloneness of your thoughts.

But we’ve got to speed up the novel. Get it down to a two hours read. Two hour twenty tops. Accelerate meaning. Hastening emotion.

Strip back the narrative. Keep it present tense (if only to avoid those pesky “ed” and “ing” and other delineators of time gone from slowing down the narrative and lengthening the word count).

We can take a lot of cues from the industry screenplay form.

Fade in. Dissolve. Move. Glide. Hover. Peer. Roll.

Intro characters in CAPITAL LETTERS so you can see their entrance in the story.

Unimpeded by punctuation. No inverted commas. No quotations marks. No he says, she says (except maybe to set up next line of dialogue). No question marks. I mean, do you really need questions marks. Can’t the words alone do the trick.

Short, sharp declarative sentences. Propel the reader forward. Propel the audience forward.

Oh, and cut out the word “the”.

Fade out.