SteelyKid is officially a Counselor-in-Training at the summer day camp the kids have been going to forever, helping supervise a bunch of second-graders (“My children. My biological children. All 20 of them.”). This is an extremely SteelyKid thing to be doing, and it’s generally going well.
We’re about at the halfway mark of the summer, and as part of the program SteelyKid had to write an essay in the form of a letter “applying” to be a CIT for the second half. This is largely a formality, but as Kate said last night when we were talking about it on the evening dog walk “It doesn’t need to be long, but it will be, because [SteelyKid].” And, in fact, the finished text is over 700 words. It’s also funny and discursive and in a very distinctive voice, because SteelyKid.
This loquaciousness is something of a family trait. The Pip at one point a few years ago generated a 14-page document when asked to write an essay of at least three paragraphs about a historical person. And, of course, I do… [vague expansive gesture] this.
Putting a whole bunch of words in a row has never been a major challenge for me. In college, I once wrote a ten-page paper for a history class in two hours and 24 minutes (measured from the time I created the word-processor file to the time I picked the pages up from the printer in the public computer lab). My default blog-post length is somewhere around 1500 words; these tend to be a little shaggy (as this is), but that’s one of the joys of the form. (There’s a tension between blogging and professional writing in that writing well for pro venues requires accepting that your first draft sucks but can be made better, while blogging success requires you to generate first drafts that are good enough.)
The most difficult writing tasks for me have always been ones with a hard word count. I took a philosophy class my senior year in college that required a two-page paper (almost) every class, which I didn’t find troublesome in terms of the number of assignments, but because this was a strict page limit: the professor was clear that he would not read past the second sheet of paper. I spent a lot of that semester dicking around with Word in search of subtle ways to shrink the font and widen the margins— the exact opposite of what a lot of my classmates were doing. In grad school most of the papers we wrote were for Physical Review Letters, which had a hard limit of four pages, including the figures and references; I spent a LOT of time deleting adjectives and condensing author lists to “Firstauthor et al.” to get under that limit. It’s the root of my now ingrained distaste for passive-voice writing: we put everything in active voice because you can usually save a few characters that way.
This is on my mind because I’ve spent a bunch of time this summer writing pieces with length targets (three in the pipeline, one or two more to come), and exceeding those targets. I’ve been posting word counts like WeRateDogs scores on Twitter as a bit: 3300/2500 words, and so on. I do usually manage to cut these down significantly, but I don’t think I’ve submitted anything to an editor that actually got under the target (I’m hoping that actually turning things in on deadline makes up for having some superfluous words in there…). It’s a little uncomfortable less because I’m losing great colorful turns of phrase (though I’ve had to drop a few), than because I’m stripping out qualifiers and citations that would seem really important in an academic context but don’t make sense for trade publishing. Straddling those worlds is tricky sometimes.
The good news here is that a couple of these pieces come out of the laser-cooling-history project I’ve mentioned here a few times, where I interviewed a bunch of eminent physicists about the early days of the field. I pitched this as a magazine feature as a kind of trial run, because I didn’t want to commit to writing 80,000 words of interview-heavy text only to learn that I hated writing from interview transcripts. I’ve had fun pulling these together, though, and one of the issues with the length limits is that I can’t use as much of the interview content as I would like. Which means I probably will, in fact, go forward with pitching this as a Next Book Project, which will clarify a bunch of other things that have been uncomfortably vague of late.
(The question of whether this is remotely viable in a commercial sense remains open, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it…)
Of course, before I get to that, I have another piece or two with hard length targets to write. It’s nice to feel like an actual writer again for a bit, though, after too much time where all I was doing was churning out administrative sludge…
I’m being a little cagey about what, exactly, I wrote because these haven’t come out yet. You can be sure I’ll mention them when they appear in print, so here’s a button if you want to hear that:
And if you’d like to call me a lunatic for not having a problem writing at length, you won’t be the first, but the comments will be open:
Same. Rarely, rarely, rarely do I come in under required word counts -- and that holds for an 800 word op-ed piece, a 1200 word book review, a 7500 word journal article, or an 80,000 (or 100,000) word book manuscript. I swear, no matter the format, I'm inclined to go long. I've reached the point in my books where I create a "cutting room floor" document from things that editors cut/requested I cut. From my last book I probably will emerge with an entirely new book, two conference papers that will become articles, and at least 1-2 other shorter things. Hell, I intended this comment to be half as long as it turned out.
I struggled to get the PRL that got me my faculty job down to four pages. I cut and cut and cut. I believed that it was within the limit and submitted it. When the paper was published it went onto a fifth page. It was only a couple of lines over and there was an almost completely black page left. All that work to shorten it wasn't needed.