words? Exactly? One of the novelties of the Internet era is that journalism has been freed from the constraints of the printed page. Instead of conforming to the conventions of the column, the quarter page, the half page—limits that often meant unfortunate last-second cuts—the writer could now make the story as short or as long as seemed right.
But what is right? A regular reader of The Guardian online, I often find its featured articles tiresomely long and rambling. You scroll down, imagining the piece almost over, and instead it goes on, and on. There should have been some warning at the beginning telling you how many words lie ahead. So, no sooner does the Internet give us oceans of space than we realize that length was never just a problem of column inches. As with the editing process, which I discussed in a previous post, there is the question of an understanding between writer and reader about what kind of reading experience is being offered. Readers like to suppose that their favorite writers—journalists, novelists, or poets—are absolutely independent, free from all interference, but the truth is that if an author indulges his own private idiolect or goes on for too long, he can at best expect to divide readers into those who admire him slavishly, whatever he throws at them, and those who set him aside in desperation. At worst he will be left with no readers at all.
Is there a relationship between a writer’s respect for these conventions and the content or tone of what he writes, the kind of opinions we can expect him to have? I have recently been re-reading Dickens, who published his novels in weekly or monthly installments with strict limits on both the number of words in each installment (around 18,500 for a monthly and 4,700 for a weekly) and the total number of installments (twenty for a monthly, thirty or more for the weekly). Many other novelists published in this way of course, but few relished the form as Dickens did. His contemporary Trollope would write an entire book before allowing its serialization to begin, so anxious was he to stay in control, while Thomas Hardy intensely disliked working for the popular magazines, with the propriety they demanded, and reserved the right to publish an uncensored version in a single volume when the serialization was through. By contrast, Dickens did not worry about having the plot entire in his head before he started, and enjoyed the constant feedback from readers, which arguably influenced the shape his stories took. Only once, on the death of his wife’s
