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Why You Can’t Write about Fleas
It’s about the size of the idea, not the animal
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.—Herman Melville
Not every big idea needs to be in a big package. Often, the things that we remember are the short phrases and concepts. That was the thought behind Ernest Hemingway’s original six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
You can read that story, short and haunting, in less than five seconds.
On the flip side, it takes hours—maybe days—to read all of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s 587,287 words.
If you’re not familiar with book lengths, I’ll lend a hand.
- The King James Bible has 788,258 words
- Fahrenheit 451 has 46,118 words
- The Hobbit is 95,022 words long
- Oliver Twist is 155,960 words
- East of Eden is 225,395 words
So, you see, a long story isn’t guaranteed to be better or worse than a short one—in fact, length often has nothing to do with the merit of a tale.
