Keeping it Short

Too many writers have word counts in their heads.  It starts in school when the teacher demands a 500-word report, then continues when an editor wants 3,000 words for a magazine piece, and finally culminates with a publisher’s demand for a 60,000-word novel.

            If our finest work comes short of that, we stretch, don’t we?  We pad.  We think of ways to bloat and ruin our writing until it hits the required mark.  We add useless chapters, unnecessary descriptions, redundant examples, scenes we earlier edited out for good reason. 

            Yet the shorter stuff is almost always better.  It takes more work to cut away the fat and find the filet.  Anyone can blabber on and make the story longer.  But it takes effort to analyze a sentence and think how to make it more succinct (and thus stronger in most cases).  It reminds me of what Blaise Pascal said, in 1657:  “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."  Mark Twain said something similar, years later.

            Short story writers can tell you that, while a novelist can indulge in excessive descriptions, can adorn his pages with extra bits and long conversations, they have no such luxury.  For them, every word must earn its place.  Nobody skims or flips pages when they’re reading a good short story—they’ll miss too much.  Poetry is the same, at least good poetry is.  There’s no room for waste.

            And the truth is that while we are sometimes at the mercy of length requirements for selling our work, we should still write as concisely as we can, out of respect for our readers.  The quality shouldn’t suffer simply because we’re conforming to the word count.  Brevity, economy, spare writing—these should be our goals regardless.  Next time you’re working on a project that has a size directive, see if you can set it aside and focus on simply telling the story.  Tell it honestly, tell it passionately, tell it as best you can.  Your writing will be infinitely better, truer, and more important.  And if that’s not why you’re writing, maybe this isn’t for you.