Longer Books

I was looking at my bookshelves recently and noticed, once again, how each book in the Harry Potter series got longer.  The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Chamber ofSecrets are fairly short in length, but the books start getting longer once we get to The Prisoner of Azkaban, exploding with The Order of The Phoenix.  Basically, as JK Rowling’s books got more and more popular, as seen by enormous sales, she was given freedom to include more of her vision in the novels.  She’d proven her talents and draw, so she wasn’t as subject to some snarky editor cleaving out large parts of what we’d all love to read.

Editing is essential in our work, but I wonder just how much gets left out that the reader would enjoy.  We tend to trim based on what we think the audience would tolerate, and, truth be told, there are some tomes that need to be cut.  But every so often, you run across a gem that you want so much more of, and that’s where the freedom to tell more comes in.  Still, it seems like readers would only tolerate that kind of stuff once they know and approve of the author.  So it becomes a catch-22 – the reader wants to know you’re good, but once they know, they seem to wish you could go back and write more in what they’ve already read(and approved of).  I’m sure we all have authors and stories we wish had told us more.