Obsessing Over Your Manuscript’s Size

There are few things more obsessed over by writers than word count: required word count, in-progress word count, goal word count per day/week/month, words that were cut, words in the final version.

So I love Daniel Torday’s essay in the newest Glimmer Train bulletin, “The Secret Lives of Novellas.” It begins like this:

The Great Gatsby received some truly awful reviews when it was published. HL Menken called it “no more than a glorified anecdote” and felt its characters were “not quite alive.” Edmund Wilson said much the same. Fitzgerald spent a good deal of time writing letters apologizing for having written an incomplete book, and the main source of his contrition was this: he felt the book was too short to be accepted as truly great. Years after its publication he wrote to legendary Random House editor Bennett Cerf that the book “was a light little volume barely touching 50,000 words,” and as a result “it was a rank commercial failure.”

Torday goes on to discuss an Amazon feature called Text Stats, which—if you haven’t heard of it before—may well distract you for the rest of the day.

Check out the full essay by Torday, or view the entire Glimmer Train bulletin.