Chapter 49: How Long is Too Long?

When writers ask how long their stories can be, it is never about whether they should be shorter. I have never met a writer who wanted his or her story to be shorter. Rather, writers typically believe that their story has to be longer because the tale needs room to breathe. Besides, there is so much terrific writing coming and it would be a literary sin to cut so much as a word.

Editors do not always agree. Some will say the story should be “as long as it has to be and not a word longer,” which is a clever way to avoid saying, Not a word over 1200, or 2500, or 3000. They understand that many writers regard a word count the way a difficult diner confronts a menu: the beginning of a negotiation. Surely, 3000 words really means 5000, right? But like a menu that states No Substitutions, 3000 words means 3000. Maybe 3250. Tops.

In the days when magazine and newspaper story lengths were determined by the number of ad pages sold, there was a logic to word counts. But in an era when digital publishing allows, at least in theory, infinite space, they can feel arbitrary. I have come to believe that word counts too often reflect a perception: people do not want to read a lot of words anymore.

This perception has been fueled by a growing belief – bordering on insistence – that the internet has wreaked such havoc with the human capacity to pay attention, so much so that according to a much-cited 2015 study on attention spans, goldfish were found to be more capable of paying attention than people. No matter than those findings have since been questioned; the perception remains that people will not read stories that exceed a certain, fixed length.  

This perception is now so baked in that if you search “story length” you will find no end of authoritative-sounding sources spelling out just how long categories of stories should be – from short stories, to novellas, to nonfiction books. But then go to The New York Times Best Seller list where page counts for the fiction and nonfiction books most in demand are well in excess of those arbitrary numbers. By hundreds of pages.

Granted, we are speaking here of books, and people buy and read books with expectations quite different from those they bring to reading online. Books are a miracle: a centuries-old invention designed to accomplish one thing and one thing only: focusing attention without distraction. 

The digital world is filled with its own miracles, but focus is not one of them, which is why all the predictions of the death of print have been proven wrong. In fact, in 2021 200 million print books were sold in the United States, some 47 million more than were sold in 2020.  

We have published well over a hundred stories online. Those stories have ranged in length from 5000 words to, wait for it, 53,000; an outlier, though most were over 8000 words. I have spent a lot of time pouring over the data and can report little connection between word length and readership. We have published very long stories that have drawn ten of thousands of readers who spent a good deal of time with them – time on page measured in minutes, in a world in which that data point is often measured in seconds. We have published shorter pieces that have drawn far fewer readers. 

What I can conclude, unsurprisingly, is that sometimes a story finds its audience. And sometimes that audience is small. As to who comprises that audience we, limited by the data we are capable of gathering, do not know. But when a story breaks out it is generally because it burst past its core, must-read-it audience and found its way to those who, having not necessarily been interested in the subject, suddenly find themselves immersed. A phenomenon data scientists call “serendipity” and the rest of us call surprise.

Word counts have existed for centuries. Shakespeare cut Hamlet, which according to my Shakespeare scholar brother, Jim, was originally a gargantuan 4000 lines, a length that would have extended to four hours of performance. Hamlet, Jim told me, was written to be performed, and it is fair to conclude that Shakespeare did not want his audience sitting in the dark as Hamlet drew to its bloody conclusion. 

And that, in turn, is an important reminder that at the end of the day writers are in service of their audience. If no one is reading, or in Shakespeare’s case watching, what’s the point? He wrote Hamlet at 4000 lines because, Jim explained, it was the length “it wanted to be.” But Shakespeare was astute enough to recognize that in the relationship between him and his audience his “want” was secondary. It mattered in the writing. But when it came time to connect his play with his audience, he understood that accommodations would have to be made, if only because in the 17th century his actors were performing in natural light.

But lest you think that shorter is always what audience wants, there is a wonderful anecdote in Mark Seal’s account of the making of The Godfather – “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli” – when Paramount, which had been driving director Francis Ford Coppola to the brink of a nervous breakdown with its endless meddling, informs him his movie could be no longer than two hours and fifteen minutes. The head of the studio watched it. And hated it.  He insisted that Coppola restore almost 40 minutes he’d been ordered to cut. And with that act of addition a masterpiece, and blockbuster, came to be.

Editors and publishers exist, in good measure, to resolve the tension in the relationship between the creative force of writers telling stories they need to tell, and readers whom they want to convince to read that work. There is no easy solution, and it is certainly not found in deciding on a length because that’s how long stories are “supposed to be”. 

We, as a publication, are committed to writers. But we are also committed to delivering to readers an experience that will transport, delight, and move them. We are conscious of story length. We’d been foolish to the point of arrogance if we weren’t. 

As it happens, we have a story for you: it’s a terrific read, a journey by the author Brett Bachman in making sense of a college classmate he thought he knew, and whose life was far darker than Brett understood. It’s called “The Gatsby of the Gambia.”

If you’d like to read it in print, it’s available in Issue #7 of the Review.

But for those who prefer reading it online, we’ve decided to present it in two parts – in recognition of its worth at the length it was written, and in recognition, too, that some readers may not want to read 18,000 words online all at once. 

Part One begins with the excerpt that follows.

Part Two appears here next week.

Like all relationships there are mysteries in the one between writers and readers. Mysteries defy easy resolution, even as we try, and often struggle to make sense of them. 

A Gatsby of The Gambia

Amadou Camara built the America of his dreams, one campus drug deal at a time. 

   It was never meant to last.

                                                      By Brett Bachman

I first met Amadou Camara during the inaugural week of my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2011. We were gathered in the chapter room of a fraternity called Theta Chi, to participate in a piece of that ever-sacrosanct ritual: rush—the three-week whirlwind of meet-and-greet roulette that kicks off the first month of the academic year on many American college campuses, each five-day period bookended, for men anyway, by a slate of beer-and-testosterone-fueled events that often seemed to spiral just out of anyone’s control.

For those not steeped in Greek culture, rush is a tryout of sorts for prospective members of the single-gendered social clubs that dot the undergraduate landscape. Sororities have their own, equally-baffling version of this custom, of course, with fewer alcohol-related university damage reports and more song-and-dance routines.

Each year, freshmen arrive on campus only to be bombarded by recruitment messages from dozens of these organizations, each with their own particular brand of post-adolescent charm. We—my friend Brendan, a loud, barrel-chested Irishman from Chicago, and I, who had only met a few days earlier—had, after much deliberation, ended up at Theta Chi.

Though the original building has since been torn down, it exists in my memory as a run-down mid-century chalet, with a sloping roof and spacious front balcony emblazoned with the house’s letters: ΘX. It had seen years of hard use, with chips and cracks in the fading wood-paneled walls. At the top of a central staircase sat a lofted living room, with a large reindeer head staring out from above the stone-lined fireplace. We affectionately called him Lou (short for “Caribou Lou”), and during parties outfitted him with various hats depending on the night’s theme. 

That day, Amadou strode in wearing a gray Tom Ford suit and designer shoes that seemed to shine in the way most expensive things do—that is to say: he seemed rich, and we noticed. He had this way of sucking up every bit of energy when he walked into a room, of connecting with each person he came across as if he had known them for years. Amadou accomplished this by shaking hands with everyone he met—and I mean everyone. It was a ritual I would see repeated hundreds of times over the next several years, one we would come to imitate and parody and even mock at times. He would start at the outer edges of a crowd, usually with someone he knew. “Son!” he would say, a single staccato syllable that stopped whatever else was happening at the time. He spoke in an accent that came and went, without a clear origin that we could discern, at least at first. 

From there, Amadou moved inward, at each stop initiating a minute of awkward small talk that always ended with an innocuous yet somewhat revealing anecdote. The next time he saw you—and he was always there, at bars and restaurants and parties, in the library and on the street—he’d greet you by name, and remember that piece of information you were sure he would forget. Amadou was one of the few black faces on a mostly-white campus, with big, trustworthy eyes and an infectious grin. He had huge hands and an athletic build, but never seemed imposing, even when angry. He appeared to us an adult, at once above the fray of our adolescent hijinks yet somehow present for each moment of them.

In the months and years to come, we came to rely on him for all manner of things. When we needed contributions for a charity food drive that one of the sororities was conducting, Amadou was there with a connection for fifty-pound bags of rice. Another time, he got us a whole suckling pig for a gameday barbecue—with an apple in its mouth, the whole nine. We knew better than to ask questions. 

Click here to read Part 1.