Zack McMillin let’s Roy Peter Clark have it (from a WriterL discussion on narrative length):
During one of those unavoidable by-committee meetings that accompany a large narrative, one of our designers, upon hearing that each installment would run 35-50 inches (I think that’s 750- 1,500 words), made quite a show. “35 inches? 35 inches! That’s a lot to ask of any reader.” That the narrative focused on chess did not exactly temper his fears. “Read it,” I told him. “It will seem like 15 inches.” With apologies to those who actually took real physics at university (I took Physics for Poets at Vanderbilt), time is a relative thing when we are engrossed in worthwhile narrative. There are 12inch stories in our newspaper that read like 50, and when Erin Sullivan writes a 50inch story for us, it reads like a 15incher. While I admire Roy Peter Clark’s effort to quantify reader investment, it strikes me as folly, as futile. It reminds me of the grammar check on MS Word — OK in some contexts, but there’s no way to create a program sophisticated enough to judge all the intabgibles. Louis Menand, in a review of Lynn Truss’s work last year (here) , put together one of those amazing pieces — much like a recent contribution from Hank Stuever (here) — that is best summed up by this: “Yeah, what HE said.” So, what Louis said. By the way, when the narrative finally ran, to much praise from all over our community (and outside of it), that designer was among its biggest fans. Fifty inches, it turns out, isn’t always 50 inches.
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