Almost by definition, writers are wordy. It’s what we do; words are our trade. We all want to use them as best we can and, in order to improve, that often means trying different approaches and new techniques to help boost our abilities.

So what about brevity? Words are what we’re about, but those words also need to be the right ones. They need to get across the right meaning, and arguably keeping things brief is one way to hone our writing. After all, whether we write prose or poetry, we don’t want to waste words. We don’t want our readers to get to the end and think ‘well, half of that wasn’t even necessary.’ We want every word to count.

In a way, this comes back to debates about how long novels ought to be – and the answer that they should be as long as they need to be, no matter how long that is. But maybe we can also look at this another way, that they should also be as short as they can be. If you can say what you want to say in 50,000 words, why carry on to 80,000? Often, it’s possible for something short and sweet to pack just as much – if not more – of a punch than something significantly longer.

This is another of those issues with no right or wrong answer. Short things can be good. Long things can be good. I think the heart of the matter though, is all about finding the purpose of what it is you’re doing. As writers, we need to be satisfied with every aspect of what we do, and that includes finding the ‘Goldilocks’ length for our work.

However, we can identify some other reasons why brevity can help us to improve our writing, even if we end up going on to write a novel longer than War and Peace. One of the reasons is that keeping things short makes us think carefully about what we put. When we can’t waste words, we have to make every single word count. Setting ourselves a challenge of, for example, describing the scene outside the window in 100 words or less makes us hone what we’re doing and think of the most precise ways of saying things.

It also helps us to develop discipline, which is always important in writing whether we’re talking about actually sitting down to write on a regular basis or the mechanics of how we write. Plus, so many different types of writing are dependent on restrictions. We might write articles for publications that have a limit of so many words, or enter short story competitions that require the story to be a certain length. The discipline to write to a required length is important and, for many of us whose instinct is to write longer pieces, an important skill to learn.

Brevity isn’t always the right way to go in writing. Like everything else, it has a time and a place, but it is certainly a useful skill for us to have and it could well help our work to have even more of an impact. But what do you think? Do you think it’s important to learn this discipline or do you take a different approach to your writing?