Numbers in writing

Make no mistake, in making this blog, this challenge for myself, I decided that I would meet a minimum of five hundred words a day in writing. But numbers mean nothing. The reason I did that was so that I wouldn't feel like I was cheating myself by writing, say, a haiku. Now I have nothing wrong with haikus, but I want to be a novelist. Writing haikus so I can say that I wrote something every day isn't going to help me.

I bring this up because in school, every writing assignment is a page or word count. As we go further along, teachers don't necessarily ask for better results, but longer results, at least in my experience. And I understand that they don't see what you've written in the past, so they don't know that you're getting better. But why does longer equal better? Why is that the equivalent that we strive for instead? We do this with everything: books, movies, games. We put so much emphasis on the quantity that we forget that it's the quality that really matters.

Have you ever read something incredibly dry that just kept going? It just goes on and on and on, it never ends, and it never goes anywhere, and you feel like your brain is going to start dripping out of your ears. It just boggles your mind as you're reading it how the author could have possibly thought it was a good idea to stretch this scene out for so long. We've all been there. If we've ever written anything, we've probably thought that about our own writing. I know I have. And yet we leave it there, because we have this insane idea in our head that it has to be that long, or it wouldn't be good.

But then there are the people that get this idea too far into their head. An excellent, classic example is the philosophy final exam. The question is simple: Why? People write entire papers, pages long, answering the question. And then there's the student who responds "Why not?" It works there, sure, but can you imagine if you tried that anywhere else? It doesn't work. It's not an answer, it's a push off. You're just ignoring the question rather than answer it. People need answers. When you write, you have to anticipate those questions and answer them. Otherwise when the reader finishes reading your work, they'll feel dissatisfied. That's just as bad as making them bored.

Here's the thing. Being long doesn't make something bad. It also doesn't make something good. When you write something, it should be long enough to be interesting, to serve its purpose, and to leave the reader with no questions that you don't intentionally want them to be left with. It doesn't matter if you're writing fiction or non-fiction. It's all about the content. One of my favorite sayings as a writer is that you should write like a girl's skirt. Long enough to cover the important bits, and short enough to be interesting. And I don't care how sexist that is, because it's hilarious and true. And it's certainly not something that you'll forget any time soon.