I often say here that despite all its problems, the internet makes it possible for all of us to write up our thoughts and post them online where somebody might read them. And that's great! But the shift of writing from edited magazines to personal blogs and sites like Substack and Medium has created a new set of problems, starting with too many people don't know when to stop.
Young internet writers have never faced the editorial discipline imposed by print. They have never been told, "You have twelve column inches, make it fit." Nobody has ever said to them, "This is good, cut it in half." So their essays grow to a thousand word, two thousand words, sometimes even five thousand words. Yes, some topics are complex and take space to expound. Your opinion of the latest political blow-up is not one of those complex topics.
Complete amateurs are often even worse. Scott Siskind has for years been running a book review contest, and I find the length of these pieces downright bewildering: you expect me to read that? The latest version is the "Non-Book Review Contest," and people have reviewed stuff like films and games and even the Watergate scandal. I looked at about ten of these yesterday and not one of them was less than a thousand words long. Sorry, I don't have time for that.
There may not be anyone else forcing you to keep your writing concise, but that is not an excuse to bloviate ad infinitum. It means you should discipline yourself.
2 comments:
I've always found "This is good, cut it in half" to be a piece of mindless toughguy-ism. The quality of a work makes all the difference, and I've never found brevity to be essential to quality. If something's good and it's long, leave it. I've read and reread plenty of doorstops I wouldn't want cut at all, and plenty of terse, short efforts that simply didn't cover the subject. And by worthy doorstops, I don't just mean Thucydides and suchlike. You don't have to be a genius to be worthy of writing a big book.
The real problem with the ACX non-book reviews is that many of them are bad.
Agree completely. I can read a good storyteller no matter how many detours he or she takes.
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