Caffeine-fuelled and firing on all cylinders- it's only the first part.
This is fine. A thousand word limit for each submission, and sitting two modules, is absolutely manageable. Reading everyone else's work and critiquing it, pulling it apart, suggesting switching parts around and pulling other bits, expanding endings or brutally breaking open beginnings, it's all do-able. It keeps me in practice editing, and it keeps me entertained as I read through the good work, harassed as I wade through the shit.
But don't expect me to wade through more than I have to. The word count is there for a reason, and really, if you decide to exceed that by more than a couple of hundred words I'm not reading past it. Two people this week decided to submit lengthy 2,000+ pieces of writing. On principle, I only read half of each. Their critiques from me no doubt suffered because, as the American would probably tell me, "I didn't get it, man". But that's not my problem. It's theirs.
It might seem a bit of a dickish thing to do. I mean, what is another thousand words? What is another thousand five hundred, in reality? Two, three extra pages, tops. It isn't, though. It's two, three extra pages that are, quintessentially, extra. They are surplus to requirements. They have been included because the submitting students are lazy.
How does that work? Quite easily. Anyone can write. Anyone. It's easy to sit down in front of the blank page and splurge and pour every modicum of thought onto the white canvas. And you end up with seven or eight pages of stuff. To really be a writer, though, you need discipline. The control to hold back. The restraint to use one word when twenty have leapt onto the page instead. You have to go back and look at it again. First drafts, to me, are not just written and left. A first draft is drafted- you write it, then look at it and edit it once. That is the first draft, not just streamed out.
You need an internal shouty man in your head. Like this guy.
It's work. If the writing part is seven pages long, either do the work and edit the whole peice down to the thousand, or edit it down to how you think it should be and submit the first half. On principle, I will not read anything beyond about 1,400 words. Because you didn't put the work in, and that's not my concern.
This is what goes on in your head in the first place.
Last week, I exceeded the word count by seventeen words. This is because I had written something, realised it was about five hundred words too long, and took out the bits I didn't think were necessary. It is a discipline you pick up, it's useful, and it's courteous. Non-fiction, the course we're studying for just this term, is difficult enough to get right without people having to read more of my shit than is necessary.
Oh, and one last thing. The minute I announced in the seminar, as we turned to both the huge submissions, I'd only read half of them, people looked at me as though I was the rude one, the one who doesn't bother and doesn't give a shit. I'm so happy that they believe this. Clearly, the fact that I turn up at half nine on a Monday, having read the entire book we're discussing, having critiqued everyone's work, with a cup of coffee and a fresh face, paints me as the slacker in this scenario.
Especially compared to the eternally high American who is loud and agressive when they occassionally attend a seminar, and the strange posh boy who has so far attended just two of the classes. Compared to the fact that they both happily breeze in halfway through the hour and a half seminar and act as though they are in fact doing everyone else a courtesy just turning up. I graft over everyone else's work and over my own craft. Thank you for pointing out how ignorant and terrible a person I am for doing so.
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