February 4, 2025

We sat down with Poynter senior scholar Roy Peter Clark, author of numerous books including “How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times,” to talk about what makes good short writing. It’s a topic he’s thinking a lot about right now, as the deadline approaches for the 2025 Poynter Journalism Prizes, including the category that bears his name, the Roy Peter Clark Prize for Excellence in Short Writing. You can enter here in any of 10 categories before 6 p.m. Eastern Feb. 14. The Clark Prize carries a cash award of $2,500.

Listen to Clark talk about what poets have to say about short writing, how editors might be impeding it unknowingly and why more journalists should be doing it. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Roy Peter Clark

Jennifer Orsi: How is a great piece of short writing different from other kinds of writing?

Roy Peter Clark: The first poet laureate in the city of St. Petersburg was Peter Meinke. He said even in poetry, there’s a difference in the value of words in longer poems and shorter poems. In shorter poems, each word is more valuable. He said three qualities mark the great short poem — and he said this is true for all short writing. He said: Focus, wit and polish. 

By wit, he meant it had to be inspired or structured by a governing intelligence where you are really creating something small and tight and sharp. 

Focus is a key to the writing process and all of writing, but particularly important in short work. 

And polish is important in the sense that the unnecessary word, the extra phrase, the intensifier — it really stands out in short work. Which is why it’s important to make every word count.

Orsi: When the Poynter Journalism Prizes first created this category, what did you envision as the kind of entries you’d love to see people put forth? 

Clark: So I’m going to use an analogy I’ve used for another purpose recently. I went to graduate school on Long Island, the State University of New York at Stony Brook. It was an ugly campus in the 1970s. Really ugly. Here’s what happened: When they put in new buildings, they didn’t put in walkways between the buildings. They waited a year. In a year’s time, the students created the walkways with their feet. And then they put in concrete. 

So I didn’t have a clear idea (about what entries to expect) but what was really interesting was among the entries we got last year, there were short features, there were short reviews. There were explainers. There were clever lists. There were a couple of social media posts. There were a couple of 60-second radio spots. The winner (by Maggie Prosser of The Dallas Morning News, about a young woman who died of an overdose)  was a 450-word sidebar to a long investigative series on fentanyl.

Here we have an immense life-and-death crisis of fentanyl poisoning, and the story was about a hair band the mother wore to remember her daughter. Just fantastic. So that was the winner, but we received all of those other types of entries. And I’m saying, hey that’s great. I’m a big tent, small writing person. So please if you write in any of those forms or genres, consider sending them in.

Orsi: Why is it often harder to write something shorter rather than longer?

Clark: I can answer this question personally. Today I wrote a column and I wanted it to be 300, 350 words long, but it’s 550 words long. That’s not really a problem for me, because I’ve developed a discipline. I am among the many, many writers who are “putter-inners” rather than “taker-outers.” I just write early on. If I’m thinking it, if I may want to put it in, I get my hands moving and get it down. My ability to do that is predicated on writing earlier than I think I can. If I wait till the end of the process and don’t give myself time to take 500 words and turn it into 450 words — I give myself revision time. And that, it seems to me, is the problem that too many writers wait too long to start drafting the story. The excuse is I haven’t finished the reporting yet. 

Here’s one other thing that editors have to do. In 1992, I was in Singapore for 17 days working with a group of editors. They were having a problem with a young writer who just wouldn’t get the story in on time, and when she delivered it, it was always too long. I interviewed her, and we discovered something very quickly. The one thing the editors kept doing was criticizing her for holes in the story. In a way, I would say that’s one of the most common moves that editors have. They think, and I understand why, that they are doing their job by finding holes in the stories. So how does a reporter respond? Well, guess what? Yeah, you found two holes in my story last time. You’re not going to find any holes in my story this time. If I think you might possibly want it in the story, I’m going to place it in there. So this is a dynamic for editors as well as for writers.

Orsi: What would you say to try to persuade more journalists to write shorter pieces?

Clark: In the digital age, one of the virtues I most admire in the writers that I follow is versatility. 

The last time I was in The New York Times, which was a while ago, it was very interesting. I wrote about the power of short sentences. Even people who write long, good writers know that short sentences have the ring of the gospel of truth. I think I submitted a 1,200-word column, and they said we’re going to run this on our website, but it’s too long for our print version. I said, “Well, can I give it a shot (to edit)?” So there was a 1,200-word version. There was an 800-word version. Then when I got down to social and things like that, there turned out to be a 300-word version and then a series of tweets. And I said to myself, look at this, I’m being asked in this brave not-so-new world to write at different lengths for different audiences. And I’m glad to be able to do that. And I think writers who are not taking advantage of the short forms are missing opportunities to serve audiences in an important way.

Orsi: If someone is out there wondering whether they have work they should enter in this category, how would you guide them to decide? 

Clark: Let me speak to editors and colleagues. On a number of occasions, I’ve read something. even that student journalists have done, and told them, you know, you should really enter this in this particular contest or that particular contest. I’m not sure there’s a better way. other than money, to reward a writer than by telling them that something is prize-worthy. So colleagues and editors, bosses, and supervisors should be alert always to the opportunity to do that.

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Jennifer Orsi is Poynter's vice president for publishing and local news initiatives. Orsi oversees Poynter’s digital publishing, marketing, events and communications, audience engagement and local…
Jennifer Orsi

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