Brevity, Briefly

By Susan Goodsell - Jan 04 , 2010

Nine seconds. NINE seconds? I just read that studies show a writer has a measly nine seconds to reel in a reader. Have I caught your attention or did I lose you? This is a lot of pressure!

“Back in the day,” as we old people like to say (at least according to my 16-year-old daughter), communications were longer, more formal in tone and voice, and tended to be more—well, wordy.

When given an assignment for an article, posting something to my BNI website, writing a memorandum or even just an email, my constant challenge is cutting to get down to an acceptable number of words.

I don’t think of myself as an especially verbose person, but let’s just say if a meteor were heading toward the earth with total global annihilation a foregone conclusion, my goal would be to spend my remaining time on this planet using all the adjectives and adverbs I want to, thank you very much!

Presently, we’re not expecting any meteors and we are living in the ever-expanding culture of online news, information, and blogs. Times, they are a changin’! It’s time to make friends with bullet points, abbrevs, and Haikus, my writer friends, regardless of whether you’re writing for publication or for business.

In the interest of changing my writing style to keep up with the fast-paced times, I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open for tips on brevity in writing.

If your dream is set on writing The Great American Novel, you may wish to reassess. While short stories have traditionally been treated like the “red-headed stepchild” of the literary world, Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteredge,” a collection of 13 short stories, nabbed the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

New technology is changing reading habits: we’re reading online literary journals and downloading short fiction onto our Kindles and Sony Readers. Further, flash fiction websites (which post stories that are generally 1,000 words or shorter), are gaining in popularity.

“The shorter it is, the more every word counts,” says Lydia Davis. She should know – Davis is the queen of ultra-short stories and enjoys a huge following. Writing stories that are quite literally sometimes as short as a single sentence or paragraph, Davis knows not a single word can be wasted.

Twitter – only 140 characters to tell your story there, baby! (Follow me by clicking here.)
If you really want to do a great exercise in short writing, practice Haiku – this tightly structured Japanese poetry with its cadence of 5/7/5 is the art of brevity on steroids! I can write 250 words more easily than I can write the required 17 syllables in Haiku!

      Love to write Haiku;

   Words flow easily, quickly.

          Alas, I must end.

As a bonus, here’s my daughter’s favorite Haiku for your enjoyment. Sorry, I cannot credit the author—but we love your work!

Haiku’s are easy;

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator.

And on that note, take a short minute to see what markets are available to you if you broaden your scope of writing to include markets you may not have considered as “real” writing.

I’m glad we had this brf tme tgthr!