Being a big fan of old adage's is a wonderful thing. Sometimes seven words does a better job at describing how you are feeling than seven hundred words. With almost a month finished in the school year (really...it's been that long already?) I find myself in a wonderful position to read an amazing number of really terrific stories written by some amazing young writers. I also find myself realizing why so many teachers (and writers) give the advice that more doesn't always equal better. For a long time I thought that the more I wrote the better the story would be. If I wrote a forty page story then I would have accomplished something great. A whole book? Something stellar. Who cares if the forty pages is complete drivel or if the book was sluggish and lost the readers interest in ten pages - I don't see you writing a book.
I was all sorts of wrong.
In the past few months I have become absolutely smitten with Aesop Rock. For those of you unfamiliar with him he is a rapper that most folks will never hear of. His music is wild, his lyrics are mildly insane - he's too smart for mass consumption. Anyhow though he is an absolute lyrical genius (when what he says is at all logical and coherent). He drops metaphor and simile's that make Harper Lee look like a simpleton and he can be more descriptive (and succinct) in ten words than Tolstoy was in ten thousand. And he taught me something invaluable that previously I had absolutely refused to believe.
Less is more.
I can write a hundred pages about just about anything (or nothing) and by the end of the year my students will be able to do the same. Will I be able to teach them though how to write ten words that have more meaning, more depth, and more purpose than that same hundred page book? Hopefully I will - no promises though. I do promise though to stop making arbitrary requirements for story length - from now on it's all about content expectations.
Maybe I'm not changing the world with this but as Aes says; "Everybody's gotta push something / That's why the envelope is where it wasn't"
Consider yourself pushed, envelope of arbitrary requirements in life.