The impossibility of the word-count
I recently embarked on a doomed project to convert a section of a draft unfinished novel into a short story, for a competition.
Needless to say, I failed. It seemed a reasonable challenge in the beginning. I wasn't going to take the whole novel plot, just the opening set-up. I thinned out the characters and came up with a much shorter plot which left more to the imagination - something short stories often make a point of.
It still didn't work. I could get down to 6000 words with a lot of heartbreak but I simply could not get it down to 3000 without gutting everything that made it what it was. This made me question, unreasonably, the whole premise of the short story - how can anyone create anything good with a built-in word limit?
Of course, that's nonsense. Poetry is an obvious example of something that creates beautiful worlds and ideas in a minimal form. But the experience made me grateful to be a writer of novels, which, within reason, have no word limit and I can let my characters and settings expand as much as they like.
On the subject of poetry, I found myself in the village of Porlock last week, source of that anonymous literary vandal, the 'person on business from Porlock' who interrupted Coleridge before he could write more than the first few lines of the poem Kubla Khan. What would the rest of it be like - or is it true, as some have speculated, that Coleridge had already got stuck with the poem and the person from Porlock was himself a fiction?
Needless to say, I failed. It seemed a reasonable challenge in the beginning. I wasn't going to take the whole novel plot, just the opening set-up. I thinned out the characters and came up with a much shorter plot which left more to the imagination - something short stories often make a point of.
It still didn't work. I could get down to 6000 words with a lot of heartbreak but I simply could not get it down to 3000 without gutting everything that made it what it was. This made me question, unreasonably, the whole premise of the short story - how can anyone create anything good with a built-in word limit?
Of course, that's nonsense. Poetry is an obvious example of something that creates beautiful worlds and ideas in a minimal form. But the experience made me grateful to be a writer of novels, which, within reason, have no word limit and I can let my characters and settings expand as much as they like.
On the subject of poetry, I found myself in the village of Porlock last week, source of that anonymous literary vandal, the 'person on business from Porlock' who interrupted Coleridge before he could write more than the first few lines of the poem Kubla Khan. What would the rest of it be like - or is it true, as some have speculated, that Coleridge had already got stuck with the poem and the person from Porlock was himself a fiction?
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