Longreads as a virtue

God bless Kevin for writing it, but I don't think anyone really believes this.

You don't win awards for shortreads. You win them for longreads. And awards matters far too much to journalists for sheer word count to not be a factor.

 

I'm kind of out of this part of the business, but I think there's been a bit of shift here. At least I experienced a shift and so have a few of my writer friends. Absolutely, there was a period of "longreads" fetishization a few years ago, and I think writers pretty naturally think of word counts when it comes to the "heft" of a particular piece. Speaking personally, I would be proud of being able to write a certain length and have it published, but later came to realize that a lot of stories—like a lot of movies—are just too long. We're writing TV episodes now that don't have to fill an hour network block, necessarily, and it's one of the great things about streaming shows. If an episode's natural length is 42 minutes, that's fine. For magazines, I kind of came to feel like 4,000 words or so was a good length for a feature, and my editor agreed.

Do 4,000-word stories win awards? Well, according to this analysis from 2016, the shortest story to win as Ellie was 3,931 words, but the median length was 10,209 words:



Which seems to support your point. Maybe these stories win not because they are long, but because they are worth their length. These are the best stories of the year, remember (or so have been judged). Most of the time, what makes for a good story and reading experience? I'd say something much shorter. More than 3- or 4,000 words, and you'd better have some serious goods.

 

Your expertise here is far greater than mine, but I heartily agree that magazine award-winning stories tend to have a lot of heft, and usually for good reason, and usually that reason is the depth of reporting requires a bigger canvas.

The stories that actually win the awards - written by women and men at the top of the business - deserve to win them.

I suppose what I mean is there's an idea that, unless it's long, it isn't in the running for awards, and thus, it just couldn't be that good. And since, let's say, 97% of stories written are not written in magazines and lack the canvas/cultural-moment cachet to be those kind og award winners, a lot of those stories are larded out of aspiration, not need.

So, when Draper tweets that, I mean, good for him - and he tends to practice what he preaches - but there's a source behind why it became a trend.

 

I snicker when I see a Deadspin alumnus standing on a perch and telling everyone where journalism ought to be headed. It happens more often than you think.
I don't care for longform as a genre - I would rather just read a book - but it was the market that decided these aren't the future and not anyone else.

 

I think aspiration is the right word. I think it's natural, the way runners want to run farther or faster or both, for writers to want to stretch. And because the stories that do get awards tend to be long, there's a sense that stories have to be long to be good. So it's kind of a double self-incentive: I want to see if I can write 5,000 words or whatever, and, if I want to be considered an important or serious writer, I have to write that length.

And in terms of these tweets that seem to be bragging about length—I think that's a shorthand way for writers to say, Hey, I've worked really hard on this thing, it took a lot out of me, and I hope you read it. When maybe they should just say that.

Pretty indisputably, the sum of all these things—as well as a general decline in editing and the Internet's limitless space—is that lots of stories today are too long. I feel like almost any story improves with a good threshing, but that's sometimes hard to impress upon young writers especially, and there's a lot less need to do it than there once was, so it doesn't get done.

There are still long stories that deserve to be long, of course. But word count as a virtue in and of itself is dumb, I hope most reasonable people can agree.

 

The problem? Some stories that are being fit into the same 14-16-inch print hole need to be allowed to be longer.

In contrast, some 50-inch stories meander and could be told much better tightening to 20-22 inches.

Bragging about how much was written is crap. That says zero about the quality. Not at all a fan of trying to turn everything into a capsule. But writing 3,000 words - or 5,000 or more - doesn't say much. What is actually contained within the piece is the key. Always has been.

 

It was ever thus.

Novelists are generally more revered than short story writers. Word count being one of the few metrics available when talking about writing.

Bottomless pages and the infinite space available online has aggravated that habit.

That said, I'm not sure prizes have much to do with it. Plenty of newspaper Pulitzers for shorter work. Editorial; commentary; criticism are all shortform. Same in magazines.

Some stories need to be long. Some don't.

Bragging and insecurity and human nature haven't changed.

 

I don’t know about you hacks, but my 10,000 word features grip readers and don’t let them go. The time flies by thanks to my aggressive narrative and masterpiece prose.

That’s just me though.

(Ok, I’ve never written longer than about 5,000, and when I look back that story feels bloated. “Long feature” has mostly meant closer to 3,000 for me. We were really lucky at my last newspaper job, less than 10,000 circ, to regularly have the opportunity to go 2,000-3,000 with good stories.)

 

A friend of mind had it right when she inadvertently referred to tweeting as "twatting."

It's absolutely the most worthless, time-sucking medium we've yet devised. Don't tweet until you've published? Don't tweet period. If the content is good, people will find it. Ya know, on Facebook.

 

The best features editor I've ever written for said something to me once that I've always taken to heart:

You can take a really good, well-paced, well-structured story that's 5,000 words, and it will read like 2,000. But you can take the same story, cut it to 3,000 and it will read like it's 8,000. It's not a science; it's still art. Give readers a reason to keep going and they'll want to keep going. If you've got no narrative tension in the story, not many readers will get to the end.

 

Had some great advice in newswriting. Write long, the editors will cut what the story doesn't need. Write short - don't give the editors anything to cut.

 

I’m sure you folks aren’t talking about SJ longform.