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Can a Novel Over 500 Pages Get a Point Across?

It is a writer’s occupation to create a novel that touches the reader’s life. Through the conflicts, subplots, suspense, cliff hangers, and imagery a novel becomes a movie in the readers head. On the big screen movies have to go through all the main plots in a certain amount of time. It has been shown a movie over three hours normally bores the audience or no one will actually go to the theater to sit through the movie. Therefore why are authors writing novels that exceed the average of five hundred pages? If we cut down movies to get the point across, shouldn’t we cut down novels as well?

When novels exceed five hundred pages they lose touch with the message that’s trying to get across. To make a novel longer you have to add multiple subplots, these plots can confuse the reader because they do not have an extreme relevance to the main conflict in the novel. These excess details can also bore the reader because they are struggling through them to get to the main conflict. Also if a reader sees a novel is more than five hundred pages they will be less likely to pick up the novel and read it. So if an author’s job is to write for the sake of influencing people, why would they write a novel that most individuals would not even attempt to read?

11/22/63 by Stephen King, is a novel that is over eight hundred pages. This novel is about a man going back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This main plot of the story is what initially interested me to read the novel. However, the novel being so long ruined the main plot and the overall message of the novel. There were too many repetitive sub plots of love and saving different families from devastation. This took the attention away from the only reason why I wanted to read the book, to see the outcome of JFK being saved. Also with the sub plots dragging on there were excess and repetitive details that could have been left out of the story that had no real importance to the overall plot. Stephen king could have easily cut down his novel to five hundred pages. This would have enabled readers to be more likely to read it. As well as getting the point across in a clearer way.

Novels over five hundred pages make the message of a novel hard to get across. It causes the reader to get bored with the novel and not want to continue reading it if they know they still have to struggle through hundreds of more pages. We need authors to not exceed the average amount of pages because novels can influence lives. The more novels we have that individuals will read the better lives can become through their message. Therefore, when creating a novel over five hundred pages they fail to get the point across and in essence fail the individuals on the influence the authors could have inflicted on their lives.