Writing Long, Writing Short

 by Sybil Johnson

Recently, I’ve been working on an essay about crafts in cozy mysteries for a book on cozies being put together by Phyllis Betz. Essays need to be 2000-3500 words. I knew from the get-go that mine would be closer to the bottom end of the scale. Sure enough, the first draft has come in at around 1200 words.

I’m not surprised about this. I know I tend to “write short”. You may have realized this from my blog posts, which tend to be on the shorter side. I admit I have little tolerance for reading long email messages or blog posts. That doesn’t mean I won’t read them, but if they don’t capture my interest right away, I’ll most likely skip over them. That doesn’t apply to the posts of my fellow Type Mers, of course.

I’m not really sure why this is. I don’t lack patience. On the whole, I’m a pretty patient person. (Say that 10 times really fast!) I read long books. When I work on craft projects, they’re often of the longer variety. I suspect it has something to do with the messages and posts being online. My eyes get tired of staring at a screen after a while. I’d rather spend that staring time working on my own writing or updating a website.

My books in their final form usually come in around 75,000 words. That seems to be my sweet spot. The initial drafts, though, are usually 10,000 words short of that so I end up adding scenes to get to that count. This hasn’t been true of my WIP, which I am almost ready to declare done. It started out at 80,000 words and has now been edited down to 75,000. It’s a much better story for the changes. 

This all got me thinking about “writing long” vs. “writing short”. Is it easier to write too much and edit it down or write too little and have to add scenes?

In my own work, when I add stuff, it tends to be a very focused add. I think long and hard what needs to be done. Once I’ve figured that out, I tend to write the new stuff fairly fast.

There are times, though, I wish I was more verbose in my initial drafts. I think it would be “easier” to take words out than put them in. But if you have to junk entire scenes and rework the plot a bit, it can be more time consuming. So maybe it’s a case of the grass is greener on the other side. I’ve decided I should just go with the flow and believe the path to a final version is different for every story, even for the same writer. There is no “easier” way.

What do you all think? Is it “easier” to “write long” or “write short”?