On Brevity

There is no greater truism than brevity being the source of wit. Writers have a much better chance of getting laughs with pointed humour than the meandering banter in fashion right now, across endless panel shows. But it isn’t just comedy; other forms of writing make a virtue of succinctness too. When constructing a script, it is vital to remove all unnecessary detail, not to try and do the job of the actors, director, cinematographer, wardrobe people and others. If a line of action or dialogue isn’t vital to character or plot then it has to go.

As writers we should always be trying to cut out the fat anyway, that’s the number one rule. But this doesn’t mean the world outside your writing room must equate ‘short’ with ‘good’ necessarily. If artistic industries go about setting limits on creativity, everything from Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu to the Godfather films to perhaps the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace, would be overlooked, and the latter book doesn’t actually possess an ounce of fat (outside of its interminable epilogue).

That said, you only have to watch a few recent films sprawl beyond the two-hour mark to see the vast majority haven’t been plotted tightly or edited ruthlessly enough. Most recently, Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ was a particularly egregious example. Here a perfectly decent two-hour movie was stretched out to almost three thanks to Harvey Weinstein, Tarantino’s long-term patron, giving the writer-director free reign to indulge himself. Quentin is clearly convinced he always knocks out the gold and this can be a common problem with the established auteur in what ought to be a fully collaborative medium. Away from film, Alan Moore recently unveiled his long-awaited opus ‘Jerusalem’, a 1,200 page book that’s been criticised for self-indulgence. Once you pass a certain level of success, it seems no one wants to affront their resident genius by suggesting the work might benefit from a little editing. Or perhaps they do, and said wordsmith simply doesn’t listen, forcing their ego-led vision out onto the world wholesale, exactly as it was conceived.

When it comes to the newcomer, budding writers are very much in thrall to the requirements and whims of whoever happens to show interest. That’s how it should be; any upcoming scribe must prove he or she can write to the brief, show discipline and ability; display a lack of preciousness when it comes to their words. Until you reach the level of a Steven Spielberg or Helen Fielding you simply cannot believe everything you set down on paper gleams with twenty-four-carat brilliance. Where this leaves the more expansive writers; that budding Jonathan Franzen with his perfectly-formulated 500-page novel or the filmmaker of four-hour masterworks in the tradition of Jacques Rivette, is another matter. If we’re not careful, the length of some works could exclude their creators from the conversation altogether.

I understand where this bias comes from though. Right now there’s much hand-wringing over the supposedly-truncated attention spans of the young, what with ‘Smombie’ culture, YouTube’s infinite choice, listicles and the like. But this same moral panic (or, at least, a kind of condescending concern) has been expressed constantly throughout history. It was there when ‘penny dreadfuls’ became popular in the mid-19^th century, with the advent of popular cinema a hundred years ago, as radio proliferated; with television and computer games and the Internet and so on, ad infinitum.

Personally, I think this contemporary fear is something of a myth. Actually the young ’uns we supposedly worry about do enjoy entertainment that demands a major investment of time, but only if said entertainment actually absorbs them. Look at the enormously successful five-hour Harry Potter play, and Rowling’s books aren’t exactly slimline either. When it comes to millennials I’ll mention the in-depth Serial podcast, or the wave of Scandi-crime including the first series of The Killing, a show that took twenty hours to unfurl its mysteries. Then comes the growing popularity of ‘long-form’ journalism, or Vince Gilligan gripping us over sixty-two episodes of Breaking Bad, fulfilling a pitch that famously took Walter White “from Mr Chips to Scarface”.

Such examples prove that brief isn’t necessarily best. While remaining tightly focussed, a longer fiction can better incorporate the moral complexity of today’s world, finding a place for sub-plots and ambiguity; exploring multiple sides to a scenario. The danger for writers is that those proffering opinions will only take a cursory look then immediately judge their work “too long” before any of its more positive qualities can linger. If those with influence are instantly alienated by length you’ve shot yourself in the foot before even getting started. This can be a particular problem with short stories. With the collapse of those magazines that once helped writers make their living, now we have competitions intended to expose fresh work to readers. But as Philip Hensher writes in the introduction to his dual volumes of the British Short Story, such a development risks authors writing around the prejudices and blind spots of literary juries. It also means humorous tales are rarely rewarded, “since it’s easier to be articulate about a serious topic”.    

More prosaically, most of the competitions cap their word counts fairly low. In my experience the median is around 4,000 to 5,000 words, although many won’t accept stories that tip 2,500. To place this limitation into context, the work generally regarded to be the greatest achievement in the form, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, comes in at approximately 18,000 words. More broadly, the average length of works in one of my favourite collections, the Granta Book of the American Short Story, is well over 6,000. Today such prolixity would disqualify many famous writers from our contemporary contests. With so few literary agents or publishers willing to read short fiction, where is the next wave of talent going to come from that works beyond flash fiction, but below the novella form?

In the screenwriting world things ought to be simpler. Here script readers and commissioners use a simple rule of thumb: one page of script equates to sixty seconds, up on the screen. But this can be an inflexible, often misleading assumption. It’s perhaps best illustrated by John Cleese and Connie Booth’s Fawlty Towers, regularly voted the finest British sitcom ever made. Their scripts came in closer to sixty pages than thirty because episodes “were filled with descriptions of the action”. This was a very visual show put together at a fast pace, edited in a way that maintained the momentum. The scenes they wrote depicted the kinetic behaviour of Basil and his guests in detail, with Cleese and Booth conveying the physical humour of a man attacking his car with a tree branch, for example. This took up a good deal of space on the page and was inevitably more time-consuming to read than your standard thirty-pager but, crucially, the co-writers always knew their episodes would come in at half an hour once filmed.

Allowing yourself a certain amount of leeway when it comes to creative projects doesn’t have to be a mistake, certainly not when it comes to the early drafts. There are ways and means of embracing a sustained narrative, ones that don’t include extraneous detail or drone on irrelevantly without the basic progressions of plot. For me, there’s nothing less rewarding than a book or film where nothing happens, uninterestingly, but that needn’t be the case. Cast off the shackles in your first draft then take a red pen to the thing. Pare it down to the bone. Kill your darlings, as they say.

Because if we consistently apply hard and fast rules around length, we risk shutting down some of the most exciting voices out there. If creative industries don’t encourage newcomers in a way that gives their efforts room to breathe, it’s as likely to have a negative impact as Tarantino side-lining his editors or Alan Moore getting full creative control from awestruck publishers. I believe that fresh writing, captivating writing, is always ambitious writing, and that a creative person should instinctively take risks. We can’t do that if we’re forever fretting about the word count.