The Competition and the Economy of Words

My beautiful wife surprised me with a subscription to Writer’s Digest, a magazine that I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read in years. In reading through it, I found that they have several competitions per year. “Submit your short story, and so on and forth . . .Win this, that, or the other thing.” That kind of competition.

I figured, what the heck. I’ve got to have a least one or two stories lying about that might be good enough. Polish them up, and submit them.

You know what I found out? Getting a story ready for a competition is hard. One of the biggest walls you’ll run into is “word limit.” For years, I’ve stayed away from writing short stories, and instead concentrated on writing novels. And I picked up some really nasty habits.

The biggest? I love describing things, or really getting deep into a person’s thoughts. That means you can get wordy, even if you don’t want to.

So I pulled out a short story, began working on it, and before I knew it, I had over two thousand words. The limit on this competition is fifteen hundred words. Out comes the red pen. I can get rid of that word, and that one. They aren’t really adding anything to the story. And rewrite this section a little. Make it a little tighter here, get rid of that.  

Before too long, I’d cut it down to a tiny nine hundred words. Want to know something funny? It was a better story.

Now I’m focusing on just improving it. It’s grown a little, but not much. This last sentence I just wrote would have been a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I started writing “the story has grown a little, but not all that much.” I took the red pen to it and wrote, “It’s grown a little, but not much.” Unless I’m mistaken, it says the says the same thing with fewer word, and better.

I’m learning that more isn’t always better.