What I've learned about writing this week...

How many words is not enough?
I'm trying to write an essay; it is a piece of coursework for my Masters course in Creative Writing.  We have to write about one or two specific texts that have influenced our own writing.  We are instructed to analyse these texts (or text) in detail, showing a good level of knowledge and understanding about the effects of language choice and authorial method, and then relating these things back to our own writing.  We also have to show a knowledge and understanding of our wider reading-about-writing and the course material.

We have 2,500 words.

It appears, at the present moment, to be impossible.  Like filling a pint pot with two pints of lager (something only ever attempted after you've filled your pint-sized stomach with several pints of alcoholic beverage), or attempting to stuff a pinata with an entire Woolworth's pick 'n' mix counter, it just can't be done without tears before bedtime. 

I've written around 2000 words so far and barely touched on my second book, or on how either book has affected my own writing.  I've done all the paring down devices you're taught to do - cutting repetitions, contracting and condensing points, ruthlessly stripping out redundant words, trivial ideas or things which look like they're turning into digressions.  I've taken many finely-wrought phrases and rendered them down until they make the same point in fewer, if much less elegant, words.  I've restricted myself to discussing only three specific literary devices/stylistic conventions the novelists have used.

At this moment in time, my essay is like a professor's study in a 1930's film noir after it's been searched by a criminal gang desperate to find the secret documents hidden in the ceiling light.  

Or like an explosives expert who is really bad at his job - there are bits all over the place.

I was following a rough plan, but somewhere along the way I got lost, and now I've written too much on one topic and not enough on several other topics, and I've not included any quotations from my wider reading or the course materiel.  Thank god for Microsoft Office!  At least you can move stuff about.

                                   

So, what have I learned?  That sometimes less is more. That it's often better to write about one book well than about two books superficially. And that the Open University has a weird idea of the appropriate number of words to give students to write the essays they set.