Word Limit Quotes

If you have to go back and spell-check the text you're about to send, you're saying too much.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

If you give a writer a pile of blank paper and say you can write anything you like on any subject you want at any length you want, you will probably never get anything at all, whereas if you have 900 words to write, and it's fiction that is somehow op-ed fiction, and it needs to tie in with Halloween . . . okay, those are my constraints, that's where I now need to start building something.

In six pages, I can't even say "Hello.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.

Most of my videos are 60 seconds long. They can only fit about 200 words. There are a lot of things that I wanted to discuss about a given topic - my feelings behind it, how I ended up making a video, what happened before and after - that I couldn't because I had this 60-second limit.

The tendency when you dictate is to overwrite, because you're not counting pages, you don't really know what the hell the page count is.

I'm not Cormac McCarthy, but I can get my point across in a thousand words.

The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research - that's all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That's a serious flaw in my writing process - shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.

In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.

There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.