Short Forms

My thing is novels.

I don’t feel like I’m delivering on my promise if anything I do is less than 80,000 words. That works out to about 300 pages, depending on how I handle the dialog. I know plenty of people who can’t get past a short story, which typically runs about 3,000 words, or ten pages.

These days, I’m sure that seems terribly verbose. Since the advent of email, communications have gotten increasingly concise, to the point of terse. While I was working, a typical email from me ran no more than two lines, maybe thirty words. Anything that short comes off as curt. If I send you an email, you’ll think I’m mad at you. I’m not. I say what needs saying and save my fingers from all that excess pecking.

Even at that, in this age of texting, I’m probably still verbose. Texting seems to demand a minimum of characters, at least partly because pecking anything on a tiny keyboard is cumbersome. Before smartphones, it was worse. You might have to punch a key three times to get the right letter. No wonder people substitute U for you, 2 for two, and BFF for whatever that means at the moment. I can’t do that. It violates some moral compunction I have for correct grammar and spelling.

I am definitely out of tune with the times. Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Facebook entries seem to be limited to about 500 characters, although I’ve never seen it spelled out. I’ve seen several people enamored to Two Word Stories, like Fool Plunges. I guess that’s all you need to know. The art form doesn’t leave much room for character development.

There was a time when letters, laboriously composed in longhand, might go on for six or seven pages. The letters between John Adams and Abigail are voluminous enough to challenge my novels. Novellas and books of poetry less than two hundred pages once found an audience.

When I started blogging, I typically expended two pages, about seven hundred words, on a post. When I joined the Oakland Press, they advised me to cut that by half. Three hundred words was best. Five hundred was a realistic maximum. I guess people have shorter attention spans, probably from spending too much time texting.

Reading anything on those tiny screens will make your eyes cross, so I’d better sign off.