After spending yet another painful weekend pruning over 4,000 words or roughly fifteen pages from a complex essay that took over a month of previous weekends to craft, I am becoming increasingly puzzled by and frustrated with the stringent word count restrictions imposed by literary and academic conferences and writing competitions and am wondering for the umpteenth time in my literary career…why is brevity so universally celebrated? And when exactly did less become more?
In a world of tweeting, texting, cinquains, and the widely popular flash fiction and short shorts, the art of epic articulation is no longer appreciated and extolled. As writers, we are called upon constantly to synopsize, abstract, and shorten our work. Most literary journals and conference calls for submissions set essay and story limits of 2,000 words, which not only make comprehensive analysis or lavish storytelling impossible but also, quite frankly, cramp my style. Heck, my list of works cited typically comprises 1,000 words alone.
The length parameters of most submission opportunities are about a third of the critical essay and creative prose minimum page requirements in graduate English and Creative Writing programs. Weeks and even months of research and writing are required for a 15- to 25-page paper or narrative of “publishable” quality, which immediately needs to be condensed to a scant seven pages in order to meet the submission guidelines for publication or presentation. Any writer who has attempted to abridge creative prose or an essay that drastically knows well the instability of what remains once its structure has been so severely compromised.
In the end, with just twenty hours remaining before my target conference submission link was closing, I read the culled fragments of my original 6,000-word Bakhtinian analysis of Wilde’s only novel and decided against submitting it. The part was simply inferior to the whole. Call me verbose if you must; I still believe more is more.
Michelle,
I loved your Bakhtin paper on Wilde and am happy to hear you have not cut it down for this conference. It would be a complete shame to have such great writing reduced just to meet the word count requirements (limitations). I understand about the word count limitations for the conference to allow enough time for presentations …but still, the reduction process can completely ruin a large paper. As MA and/or MFA students, we typically write long papers for our classes. So the selection and then reduction of a paper to submit for conferences can be tiresome, disheartening, and brutal (especially when the word count includes the references/citations!).
Anyway, I hope you found a paper that you could submit to this conference. As much as I wanted to attend this conference, I didn’t have time to slice and dice a paper for this conference. My focus really needs to be on my thesis if I intend to finish next semester (or Summer); keeping my fingers crossed…
Anyway, take care and keeping writing those long essays! Who knows, maybe one day you’ll see one of them published in a literary journal…
Thanks, Hallie! I know you sympathize with this dilemma. I think a solution would be to unleash the length requirement for paper submissions then require its presentation to meet time restrictions. That way, the paper is considered on its full merits, and editing only needs to occur on acceptance.
I worked on condensing two others last night – one on the controversies surrounding Jonathan Franzen and the other I just wrote last month on chaos theory and the butterfly effect in Virginia Woolf. I reduced the paper on chaos in Woolf to 1,995 words (about half of its full length version) and submitted it minutes before the deadline.
I’m excited for you and know you’ll finish your thesis as planned. Are you down to thesis prep, or do you have another workshop left? I’d love to workshop your final chapters! In any event, keep me posted.
Thanks again for your continued support – I will miss you once you finish!
Michelle
[...] is another recurrent theme on Archetype; “In Celebration of Technique,” “Last Writes,” “More is More,” “Not Quite Write,” and “Drafting Perfection” are a few of my personal favorites. However, [...]