Brevity - Easier Said Than Done. What I Mean is, Sometimes It's Fine to Be Brief, Other Times It's More Appropriate to Use a Lot of Words.

When I was getting my doctorate in Doctoral Studies at doctordegrees123.com (it's actually not as prestigious as it sounds), the credits we earned were tied more to quantity than quality. I recall some of my classmates copying and pasting entire scripts of Who's the Boss? episodes solely for the purpose of meeting the 5,000 word minimum. As I tried to take my education a little more seriously, I kept my copy-paste plagiarism to medical shows like E.R. or Who's the Boss? (the later seasons when the storylines were on life-support - rimshot! Gotta get a rimshot guy on staff.)

So it's no wonder that my training in prolificity has spilled over into my leisure writing. I'll give you an example: one of my regular readers - for the time being let's call her 'mom' as she's married to my dad - broke the news that I could get the same point across in a tenth of the words. I rebutted her for nearly twenty minutes straight, emphasizing and re-emphasizing the virtues of a well-composed if loquacious diatribe. She later told me the call dropped two minutes in. Subsequently I emailed her my stance on the matter. She said her internet's been spotty and not to bother resending it for fear of "clogging up the cables".

The longest English-language novel is a work of the notorious late sci-fi writer and philosopher L. Ron Hubbard, now intergalactically known as "that creepy Earthling". It's called Mission Earth and it tips the scales at 1.2 million words. That might be an airy novella in the thin atmosphere of Uranus, but it's a weighty tome here on Earth. Of course, in today's world of inexpensive self-publishing, anyone can write a novel (seriously - they let anyone write these days), no matter how verbose. Hubbard's Earth looks like a pamphlet on childhood bulemia compared to Mark Leach's Marienbad My Love - 17 million words in sum. I bet Marienbad didn't even make it all the way through.

[You know, on second thought, the pamphlet could really be about any topic; childhood bulemia just took on the quality of 'littleness' to me and seemed contextually appropriate. Offended readers can call (877) SEAN-930 to express their contempt.]

I guess my point is this: tough cookies. If you're looking for a breezy stroll through the literary park, try Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. You know what, try The Alchemist anyway, it's actually a pretty moving piece of literature. Plus it's wicked short so you can take it in in like one sit--

Eph.