I have developed and am slave to all the habits of a large and long-winded writer.
I like to come at my topics from a long way off, slowly circle them, making side points and what I believe to be mostly worthwhile observations, and finally get to the point of what I’m talking about not at first, or second, or even third, but essentially only once I’ve exhausted the process of introducing my ideas do I start making it plain how the various things that I’ve said add up to a whole, a single idea.
The effect of my essay style is intended to be similar to that of a story; development after development, a general drift to the content, culminating in a crisis and a final explanation.
Hopefully sometimes this works and is, if not efficient, then maybe is at least intellectually stimulating or satisfying. But it’s not as easy for the reader to read as just putting the point out there and then making a case to stand up behind it.
It would probably be better, or at least more effective, to be able to say what I have to say without all the wandering, the side points, the slow progression of observations and ideas.
I use more words than I have to.
When I was in school, almost every writing assignment I was ever given was in terms of page count. As I’m sure it was with most of us. I want three pages on what Prufrock is really saying and what it says to you by Monday. The final paper will be ten pages long. Generally, as I’m sure it was with most of us, the idea was to get to the page count and stop, but if you went over it was okay. It wasn’t like there was a page limit. I remember once in 5th grade my teacher, who was particularly excellent, gave me back my short story, which had opened up on me and spilled into page after page after page, and said it was too long and I had to do it again. My mind was, in a manner of speaking, blown. Too much? It didn’t make any sense. I was actually surprised and confused at first, and then kind of hurt, as I’d enjoyed writing it, but it was probably the most important lesson in how to write I’ve received. And I’ve received it again and again and again, and it still hasn’t sunk in.
One day I’ll do an article on The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and how it packs more useful information on how to figure out how to be your own writer in its 100 or so pages than most of the other books you’ll find on the shelf near it. Today is not that day. The one piece of wisdom that has sunk deepest into my brain, and which has been the hardest to reconcile with my methods as a writer, is that fewer words are better than many words. Your message is more effective when it isn’t watered down. Try to say it with the smallest number of plain, straightforward, well-chosen words you can, and the rest will mostly take care of itself.
Everywhere you look on the web these days, it seems like people quantify their accomplishments in amateur writing in terms of word count. The biggest user of this yardstick that I’ve had dealings with is National Novel Writer’s Month, NaNoWriMo, which I’m overall persuaded is a good thing, if a little misguided.
Why do I say misguided?
Mainly it’s a matter of word count.
The idea behind NaNoWriMo, for those not already familiar with the game, is that you sit down and, in the thirty days of November, produce a 50,000 word manuscript which, at the end, you get to call a novel, because 50,000 words is the standard lower limit definition of how long a novel is, as compared to a novella or long short story.
Turn in 50,000 words by the end of the month ant your assignment’s complete, class. Not a page count this time, but you get the idea.
How many words is 50,000 words? It seems like a lot.
Well at my speed it takes about 5 hours to write that much, and probably something like 50 hours to write that much, if I don’t get distracted. I might be able to get that number of hours writing down with overwork during designated sleep hours and caffeine abuse, but let’s not push it.
The problem, at least for me, is that in the big picture 50,000 words is actually not that much.
In my experience, most good novels, the ones that let you stretch your legs and get to know the people involved, get a feel for what’s happening and live in the story for a while, are at least twice that long. Most of the best ones I’ve read so far are four times that long or longer.
In fact, I can think of only a handful of books I’ve read that were, say 60,000 words or shorter that I would say felt like complete novels with beginnings, middles, and ends, and I could tell that each of those were the result either of concentrated, rigorous work in honing down the story to its barest elements as a part of the statement (see Slaughter-house Five), or of consummate talent and a bold and simple idea (see Fahrenheit 451). In either case, I would say that the low word counts of these stories were the mark of people who could turn out substantially more than 50,000 words in a single month if they had to, and if which words they chose didn’t matter, but who would say that the length of a story, independent of its effectiveness, is the last thing worth worrying about when you’re writing it.
Why fixate on word count?
It’s an easy target, I think, and it’s difficult for people who aren’t writing all the time to churn out 1600 or so words a day (math?) in order to hit 50,000 words in 30 days. If you are writing every day, I would say that 1,000 words a day is a great goal to start with, especially if you’re talking about unrefined first drafts, in which case a person should be able to turn out 365,000 words, roughly The Brothers Karamazov, in just a year.
So it seems like word count isn’t everything. How does this relate to me as a storyteller, again?
Well, the last time I did NaNoWriMo, I hit about 80,000 words by the time I was done with the month, and I felt I was about one-third of the way into my story, no further. It was a great time, and I cherish the manuscript that came out of it and continue to work on it to this day, but when I hit 50,000 words, it wasn’t done. If I could get it down to 50,000 words one day, I would probably see that as a more impressive and a more worthy accomplishment than hitting the roughly 240,000 words I seem to think I need to tell my story in full, at least the first time out that I’m trying to think it through.
But the main thing, the conclusive thing, that I would say about myself is that I write too many words and don’t have a clear way of getting right to my point.
So what’s the matter with me?
If I had to force myself to guess, I would say that it’s because of two reasons.
First, I’m an unclear thinker, at least where first drafts are concerned.
In many ways, good writing and clear thinking have a symbiotic relationship. Or maybe good writing is a parasite that feeds off clear thinking’s blood without giving anything back, I’m not sure. But I know that most of the things I have to do as a writer to feel like I’m doing a good job at getting my ideas across are basically reducible to being able to think things through clearly and to express them as plainly as possible.
For instance, when I write dialogue for characters, I write what I hear them saying in my head. Simple. They do the talking for me, really, I just dictate what they would say. That and try not to use too many adverbs in how they’re saying it, unless it helps give an image that further refines the feel of what they’ve said.
When I describe a place in a story, my inclination especially in my earlier writing, is to drift towards too much detail rather than too little; it’s for this reason that my ideal book would be illustrated, so I could concentrate on giving indirect characterization through their impressions of something the reader feels they’ve objectively seen, rather than spend time trying to persuade people that what they’re seeing is the way something really was for sure because I said so.
Where was I?
When I get muddled and begin struggling with a piece, it’s usually because I’m having difficulty in clearly seeing what it is that I want to say. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because I think the journey to understanding, even when you’re trying to understand yourself, can turn up a lot of useful surprises from the details. But it is certainly distracting when you’re not able to pin down what it is you’re after, but have a strong idea that there’s something there.
Second, I would say that my word counts are too high because I’m too lazy. This may seem counter-intuitive, but bear with me.
I once watched a video (and I hope it’s still available on youtube... oh good! here it is). it was called Talking Funny. The video is a prolonged discussion about stand-up comedy, humor in general, and life, between Ricky Gervais, Louis CK, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld.
Anyway at one point they’re talking about how they come up with the idea of a joke, and how they’re thinking over something that’s funny, but it’s not clear what the joke is. And they’re talking about how it’s not really clear what’s funny about a thing, and it’s not clear what the joke is or how they’re going to use it in an act in the future, and Jerry says, “But there’s something there.” There’s a feeling one gets, about something waiting to be brought to light and made useful creatively out of some common or ordinary thing, or out of anything, and which it will just take time and effort to puzzle out.
I guess that’s my whole lazy approach to essay writing, really. If I knew what my point was, clearly, at the start of my essay, I would just say that and be done with it. What I like to do is take the reader along with me for the experience of my figuring out what I’m talking about as I’m talking about it.
The problem is that I run up quite a word count while saying something that I could have said in a very few words, if I had bothered to write one draft, figure out what I’m trying to say, and then start over with that in mind and build a second, shorter, shinier essay out of that.
Laziness.
Cut away everything that doesn’t directly relate to making that point, to let the point stand on its own and make itself plain to the reader.
That is probably the hardest part of the job for me.
If I were able to do that every time, I think I would probably be a much more effective writer.
So far in my time writing essays for other people to read, I’ve been plagued by a sense that I’m not quite getting to the bone of what I’m trying to write, so to speak. I’m not cutting all the way to the heart; that in a sense even I don’t know really what I’m talking about, or what I’m trying to say. I only really have my topic in hand, and my conviction that there’s something there worth writing about, and that if I keep working at it I’ll figure out what that is.
The problem is, I can’t spend much more than about an hour composing each essay I put together to send out into the world these days, and an hour only really leaves me enough time to wire my mind into my keyboard and cut a first draft brain-download of everything I’m trying to churn out and figure into some kind of a line.
If I had more time on top of that, I could start taking material away, and getting down to what I’m really trying to say, and how to best say it without anything extra getting in the way.
So, odd enough it might be to think about, if I were able to spend more time on these essays, they could be a lot shorter.
And probably a lot better.
But for now I just have the one hour.
So for now, while I’m trying to keep these essays short, the word count may stay high. But I will try to cut to the chase more often, and get some effective writing done, rather than slowly circling in and treating my essays like they’re the stories of how I figured the essay you’re reading out.
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