[Below an email from my editor friend, Don Gallo, and my reply....]

Hey Will,

For quite some time I’ve noticed that the length of many YA novels has been increasing. There used to be an unspoken “rule” that said that books for teens should be about 200 pages long. But the average YA novel these days is more than fifty percent longer than that....

But that has not been the case with your most recent books.   The first book in your Motor Novel series, Saturday Night Dirt, is limited to only 163 pages, and your forthcoming Super Stock Rookie is 208 (according to the advanced publicity I’ve seen).   Is that because you feel your intended audience won’t likely read a longer book?   Was there any pressure from your editor or publisher to keep it that length?   Or having been in this business for quite some time, is that old 200-page “rule” so deeply embedded in your writing mind that you won’t write something longer?

Best,  Don
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Hi Don,

Thanks for the letter, and the question is engaging:

I’ve thought about the length matter.  The Harry Potter series proves that kids will read longer books, and the fantasy genre in general tends to be longer because the author must make up the universe of the novel as well provide its dramatic arc.  Realism is shorter because our world is a given; the main challenge for the writer is to remember to bring it alive.  

My YA novels have gradually gotten shorter, it’s true, and with some overt calculation toward brevity in Saturday Night Dirt, kick-off to my “Motor Novel” series.  With it I’m trying to engage a really tough teen demographic:  boys who love cars and hate their English classes.   My editor and I agreed from the get-go that we needed a “non-scary” length.

However, I have been writing shorter in my last several novels more from artistic than audience-related reasons.  It’s easier to write a long novel than a short novel–and I love literary challenges.  Say what you will about Gary Paulsen, but he’s a master of the short YA novel; his Soldier’s Heart is a tour de force in 128 very sparse pages (it’s more like 90 pages in normal page lay-out). Someone, perhaps Garrison Keillor, once said, “Easy reading is hard writing,” and you get that sense when you look closely at Paulsen’s best work.

Another factor in my tendency to writer shorter, is that my original “training”, so to speak, was in the short story form.  My prose has always been shaped by rigors of short fiction, a literary boot camp that will serve any young writer well.  And it’s no coincidence that in our 21st century Age of Distraction, shorter, for a lot of readers, is better.

I also thinks there’s a growing literary divide akin to the increasing gap between rich and poor.  Kids with advantages (well funded suburban schools, middle and upper class parents, proximity to mall bookstores) read more and longer books.  Kids from television-dominated and book-less homes, often urban-center and far rural, probably read less than ever. Our friend Michael Cart recently wrote about our new “Golden Age” of YA literature, and in some ways, he’s right: the quality has never been better.  However, that doesn’t matter to a kid who doesn’t read at all.

For me at this moment, shorter novels feel right.  I’m trying to draw in non-readers, and an 400 page YA novel is a tough sell for them.

Happy New Year--Will