Self Indulgence in Writing

Many agents and publishers will come across this, where the writer can't bear to leave a passage out and is indulging him/herself because it should be excised. A friend described this to me using the old cliché about not wanting to kill your children, though I don't think this is a helpful image.

But I believe the problem can occur at the other end of the spectrum too, where the author is so well established that the editor doesn't try to edit out, or does try and gets knocked back.

A book I have in mind is 'Until I Find You' by John Irving, and I should say at the outset that this problem has nothing to do with hard work. The author is far from lazy. My edition of the text is 820 pages long and Irving wrote it twice. The first version was in the first person, but his wife persuaded him that it should have been written in the third and he rewrote it (mostly successfully, though tiny outcrops of first are still detectable).

Why is the book so long? The first section (125 pages) tells the story as the child Jack understands it. Unfortunately, he is being lied to by his mother and ends up many years later retracing his steps in an attempt to figure out what had actually happened. So the same sequence of events is narrated twice, once at the beginning of the book and again at the end. Telling the same story from different viewpoints isn't uncommon - Robert Browning went over the top with this technique in The Ring and the Book, and who reads that now? - but it is surely difficult to bring off.

This is not the only reason why the book is so long, but it is the single most important. Some time ago I attempted a detailed analysis of this title on Goodreads, but it was rejected because it was too long. I pared down the review and it was rejected again for the same reason. What I ended up posting was a shadow of what I had written. The one and only round to Irving!