Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Document length
Revising and editing
Drafting, researching, and editing

When editing for length, most often you’ll be looking to refine and cut, unless an editor tells you your needs to have more of something such as dialogue or description. In prose, this process of hacking away at words takes place sentence by sentence.

Adding sentence variety to prose can give it life and rhythm. Too many sentences with the same structure and lengthiness can grow monotonous for readers. Varying sentence style and structure can also reduce repetition and add emphasis. Long sentences work well for incorporating a lot of information, and short sentences can often maximize crucial points. Observing this general rule can help add variety to similar sentences.

As for paragraphs, they can be as long or as short as you want them to be. They can unfold for countless pages or consist of one word—even one letter. An example of the latter would be as follows:

“W—!”

(Here, someone attempted to shout wait “Wait!” but was cut off by a sudden blow to the head from behind.)

The determination to make in composing a given paragraph is not the number of sentences or words or letters, but the number of ideas. The rule of thumb—in nonfiction, at least—is that each paragraph should focus on one idea or concept. When you shift to a new idea, shift to a new paragraph, too. In fiction, its function is more nebulous because a paragraph functions as a unit of writing that further develops the story through exposition.

However, ideas, as we all know, are slippery things—difficult to package and unlikely to remain in their allotted places. How big or small is an idea? What about an idea within an idea (like a dream within a dream)?

Ultimately, a paragraph is complete when you decide it is. Any rules about them you might have picked up have descended from the well-intentioned but misguided efforts of educators to help students learn the fundamentals of writing. The topic-support-conclusion model is valid in that it helps developing writers discipline themselves to craft effective persuasive arguments.

WATCH OUT!

Opinions easily dissipate if they’re not backed up by facts or reasoning. But the form is only that—a mold that can—and should—be broken once you learn how to use it. And dictating that a paragraph consist of a given number of sentences is an understandable but lazy approach that ensures that student writers provide details before moving on to the next idea. Yet it doesn’t teach them why they must hit the given number—much like requiring a word count for an essay or report ensures that most students will grasp for quantity rather than strive for quality and resort to silly tricks like margin and font manipulation.

There are, of course, practical considerations in determining paragraph length. Readers of newspapers and other publications with narrow columns of text are more likely to read paragraphs that don’t extend vertically more than a couple inches. Similarly, websites are easier to read when paragraphs are brief.

Take care to avoid paragraphs that extend for more than half a page in book manuscripts. When working in a Microsoft Word file, I break up paragraphs of more than 10 lines in 12-point type with a 6-inch column width for print publications and limit online copy to 5 lines, although results will vary depending on the point size and column width of the particular text you use. And to tell you truth, I regularly break my own rules.

Don’t hesitate to adhere to or promote specific models of paragraph construction, but don’t hesitate to break them either. Most importantly, pay attention to what the overall pacing of your narrative demands at all times, and be sure your paragraphs provide the required flow.

As for length in poetry, the poetic foot (remember that from Chapters 13 and 18?) shows the placement of accented and unaccented syllables, while pentameter shows the number of feet per line. In the case of pentameter, there are basically five feet per line.

The types of line lengths are as follows:

One foot: monometer

Two feet: dimeter

Three feet: trimeter

Four feet: tetrameter

Five feet: pentameter

Six feet: hexameter

Seven feet: heptameter

Eight feet: octameter

Rarely is a line of a poem longer than eight feet seen in English language poetry, although the poet C. K. Williams is a relatively well-known exception if you want to see how it works.

As with paragraphs and prose pacing, poetic lines and the overall poem should work in concert—doing what’s asked of each other to generate the best overall work.