the dead guy didn't have a word count

so i won't follow one either

Author’s Note: For nearly a month, I’ve been writing 750 words stream of consciousness at the top of my day. It’s a version of Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages except virtual because my modern, instant gratification brain cannot stand the sitting and writing for however long it takes to get all those thoughts out.

These 750 words have caused some of the most thought-provoking moments of my day, so much so that I want to share something that came up for me this week. I’ve done my best to keep it as written, editing mostly for clarity and grammar. This means some things I’ve written are absolute, unfiltered drivel. Please be kind.

Mostly, these are my raw thoughts about modern publishing, adjacent to sexism. \

Throughout, in the vein of another long-winded white man, David Foster Wallace, you will find many footnotes. I take advantage of them to develop certain thoughts, eschew others, etc.

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I continue to tread my own path. I continue to beat my own drum. I continue to be a cliche because cliches are cliches because they are true and you can't stop me from using cliches because you got what I meant and to avoid them entirely means that I believe I'm brilliant at all times, brilliant enough to replace cliches and things that people already understand. We all understand them and just because we like them doesn't mean that our talents and our breadths are small.

Why write if not to be understood in some sense? Fiction or non, why write if we are to try and pretentialize¹ ourself out of connecting with a reader?

Perhaps this is the plight of a white man, the history of literature consumed by white men trying to one up each other in a literary dick measuring contest, to be so gravely pedantic and abstract that a reader must pick apart their work with slowness, commit all their time to them. ²

It's time theft. To write so hard, to write to be hard to understand. You are consuming my time³ and I am reclaiming it from Faulkner from Pynchon⁴ from Dostoyevsky from all of them and don't get me wrong: we all have our favorites. I was very much a lover of Salinger for a time and i do think Tolstoy is perfectly understandable especially on audiobook.

But the journey they take with their long-winded words, an odyssey rather than a road trip, is something many modern authors crave. Meanwhile, modern women in publishing are being reined in by word counts and tremendous pressure to be concise and to tell the story so it doesn't take too much time.

To be consumed as quickly as possible.

This is a revelation⁵, is it not? That now that women write prolifically and openly, especially in the romance genre, we must write for prime consumption⁶.

Sure, many writers wrote episodically. Tolstoy and Dickens wrote series in magazines.⁷ They were consumed in their own way at the time of their publication, way but in our modern sensibility, all compounded into one volume, that's great literature, not sacrificing anything for the story.

I don't want to sacrifice anything for my story, for your word counts, for anything that hems me in when I have things that deserve to be heard. Those who don't want to listen can walk away, can turn away and forget about it. I don't need everyone but I need my readers and they are there. There are people out there who will hang on my every word just as they hang on Proust's⁸ or Hugo's⁹ or any other number of the longwinded motherfuckers.

pretenialize

1. verb

pre·​ten·​tial·​ize pri-ˈten(t)-shə-laɪz

the act of making something pretentious

Shakespeare made up words so what’s stopping us.

2. This is not something I believe about literary works as a whole. I’m not so daft as to believe that many great works of literature are just attempts at asserting literary dominance. However, you have to admit, some of these motherfuckers didn’t need to be so long winded.

3. As I read through this again, I realize I’m talking more about writers who try to emulate or admire male writers of yore. The great works types.

4. I did not realize Pynchon was still alive. I went out with a man who wrote his thesis on Pynchon. I met him at Cole’s in Logan Square. He arrived to our second date with garlic breath and held me hostage in my bed the next morning by playing me shit YouTube videos. I shouldn’t hold this against Pynchon, but I do.

5. Okay, girl, settle down with words like “revelation”.

6. Word counts, tropes, marketable on social media with a following built-in (agents and editors will tell you this is not the case and while I believe some of them, I don’t see how it isn’t helpful in the overly-saturated publishing landscape). Marketability is a science, often stiflingly so.

7. Word counts would have been illogical when writing at a time without computers. However, authors had different rules and strictures. Page counts, volumes, series. However, nothing so pedantic as word counts.

8. I may or may not have considered reading the In Search of Lost Time series quite recently, so much so I was looking up which translation I should buy.

9. I read an unabridged version of Les Miserables my sophomore year of high school. I loved the musical and felt compelled to read the book for a project at school. It’s a beautiful book, but I’m not convinced that the account of Waterloo is truly needed.