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Optimal Word Count: Dos and Don’ts

January 9, 2019

narrative, publishing, word count, writing

If you take a look around you, you’ll discover we’re obsessed with measuringFor more on this, take a look at my article on measuring success. Your camera is this many megapixels, your phone has this many gigabytes of RAM. It’s no surprise that texts – novels, essays, and blog articles – fall victim to the same process. But what is an optimal word count for a given text?

In today’s article I’ll… Well, let’s be unusual and start from the end: I’ll eventually give you some tips on how to calculate the optimal word count for your novel (though probably it won’t be what you expect). But before that, I will talk a bit about word counts.

I’ll explain why I think optimal word counts are overrated. Furthermore, I’ll show you why becoming preoccupied with having the “right” word count for your novel might be counterproductive.

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Illiterary Fiction (New Literary Fiction Novel)

January 3, 2019

Fiction

book, fiction, literary fiction, novel

Imagine a world where people snub literature and knowledge. Those who read are “readers”, a derogatory term barely superior to being a burger-flipper. It’s a world just like our own. When you think of it, it is our own. Welcome to Illiterary Fiction, my latest literary-fiction novel.

As with most of interesting ideas, this too began with a what-if question. Seeing the impossible mediocrity that surrounds us, the disappearance of basic reading and writing skills, I had a what-if moment.

What if people stopped reading altogether? What if there existed professional readers, whose job would be to read and summarize for those who wouldn’t read anything longer than a tweet?

The world of *Illiterary Fiction* is not a pleasant one. It becomes even less so once you realize it doesn’t differ at all from our world.

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Review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

December 29, 2018

Book Review, Criticism

book, fiction, literature, review, Torday, wine

Writing a review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, by Paul Torday, is an exhilarating experience. I get to talk about the brilliance of the novel and the hopeless mediocrity that surrounds us.

Indeed, it’s interesting to give you a quick briefing of how I discovered The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce.

I saw the book at the local library. As I sometimes do with authors I haven’t read before, I took a quick look at Goodreads reviews. The average rating of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce is (at the time of this review) 3.49/5. The thing is, I have the experience to know that if a book (or a film) features bad ratings by the social masses, it might mean it’s actually good.

Taking a look at one or two reviews, I felt certain it was a book I wanted to read. People complained that there was no resolution to the story. Others gave the book 2 stars because… the protagonist was in denial.

The level of ignorance and mediocrity is appalling, when it comes to unsophisticated readers.

And so, let’s see what I thought about Torday’s novel. This is a review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce. It’s also another chance for me to express my dismay at the social mediocrity that has enthralled the world. Ironically enough, the two processes are metatextually related as you will see.

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