Over a career as a professional writer, one of the skills that has served me best is control. I’m pretty sure a tennis or saxophone player would say the same. When you reliably get what you expect out of the sax, the racquet, or the computer keyboard, you gain the freedom to create what you want.
As a writer, I’ve found one of the best practices to develop control is to write to length.
In newspaper journalism, editors would tell you how many inches of copy to write. In magazines and books, it’s word count. The internet supposedly doesn’t care how long you write, but I’ve noticed many sites list the reading time of each piece up front—so it obviously does matter.
Writing to an assigned length forces you to think about how much you can say about your topic. How deep can you afford to go? How many ideas and sources do you need? This thinking starts the writing process before research, as you size up your finite bag of words to fill.
It’s always better to know too much when you write a piece; the alternative of knowing too little can be scary and miserable. But it’s a waste of time to research a lot of details you can’t use.
Sometimes, yes, write whatever you feel, without planning—that’s a good way to encourage the joy of creation in young writers. But to write with intention, you need to know your purpose, understand your audience, and create a plan about how to reach the reader.
Control comes when you can sit in front of your blank page with those answers and your material gathered in your mind. You don’t have to pre-write the piece inside your head—be open to inspiration—but before starting you should know the shape and texture of the piece and how you will arrive at the end of your word count.
I find the discipline of a word count so helpful that I impose it upon myself even when no editor or publisher places a limit. The length is an essential fact without which I don’t know what I’m writing.
I usually plan to say a bit more than I can fit in the space I’m allotted. I write about 10 percent over the limit. Next, editing my own copy, I cut the fat to get the words down to the originally planned length. This is just a trick, but it works. Forcing myself to get rid of the weakest 10 percent always makes a piece stronger.
Planning the length of chapters and subsections in a book helps determine pacing and flow. With the length of each planned element in mind, you can feel the arc of the book in advance and sense if it works—at a stage when changes are so much easier than later on.
These are simple ideas. Sports coaches and music teachers have simple practice ideas, too. Those who gain control over their writing (or tennis or sax) do so by practicing the simple things until they come naturally.
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