But why spend so much time and energy?
Really?
I could see it if Alison Phipps were a novelist…although I would still disagree, because extended criticism of a bad novel can be both entertaining and enlightening. But Alison Phipps isn’t a novelist, she’s a “Professor of Gender Studies” – i.e. an academic. Academics don’t usually think, or at least don’t usually say, that if you can’t say something nice you should be brief and then change the subject. Academics do a lot of extensive analysis of each other’s work, and they don’t observe any rule that I’ve ever heard of mandating brevity in disagreement.
Why spend so much time and energy? Because bad ideas can have bad consequences, and they can also be interesting routes to better ideas, and they can be instructive about what not to write/do/say, and they often have implications for how people think, how they reason, how they explain the world, and so on. Saying what’s bad about a bad idea is important work, and it’s a major part of academics’ work, and yes sometimes that’s even to the tune of several thousand words.
Sometimes I think “Gender Studies” have not been very good for the thinking skills of its adepts.
She makes it sound like writing thousands of words is some sort of huge chore. Reminds me of the tips on academic presentations that I was given in grad school: if you have five minutes to present, plan on spending at least a week preparing; if you have fifteen, you should budget a couple of days for the preparation; if time is no issue, then don’t bother to prepare at all.
James Garnett, for some people, writing thousands of words is a huge chore. I can easily do 5000+ in a day during novel writing challenges, though I do write somewhat slower for non-fiction because there is a need for higher amounts of research. But I have friends who can’t manage 100 words a day, and take 9 years to write a novel…non-fiction they don’t even try.
#1
“I thought the short story was a lazy man’s game, second to ‘free’ verse, compared with the sketch. The sketch, to be really good, must be good in every line.”
– Henry Lawson