The Word Limit Is Not a Cage: How to Use a Contest's Length Cap

Most poets treat the word limit as a wall. A judge shows why the cap is actually a tool, the three ways to use it to strengthen a poem, and the counterintuitive case where a shorter entry beats a longer one.

Every contest has a word limit, and every year I read the same complaint in the pile: the poet who wrote a poem that was too long and had to cut it, or the poet who wrote a poem that was too short and had to pad it. The limit is treated as a wall, a thing that stops the poem from being what it wants to be.

It is not a wall. It is a tool, and the poets who use it win more often than the poets who fight it.

The three ways the cap strengthens a poem

The cap forces the cut. Every poem has a word or a line or a stanza that is there because the poet could not bring themselves to cut it. The word limit is the permission to cut. If the poem is over the cap, the cut is not a choice; it is a requirement. The requirement is a gift.

The cap forces the focus. A poem that is under the cap has room to breathe; a poem that is at the cap has to be tight. The tightness is the craft. A poem that has to fit a limit is a poem that has to mean every word, and a poem that means every word is a poem that wins.

The cap forces the choice. When you have to choose between two images, you choose the one that is doing more work. The limit is the judge's cut made before the judge sees it. The poet who uses the cap to choose is the poet who has already done the editing.

The counterintuitive case

The shorter poem wins more often than the longer one, and it is not because shorter is better. It is because a poem that is under the cap has been cut to its essentials, and the essentials are the poem. The longer poem has been padded to fill the cap, and the padding is the thing the judge is reading instead of the poem.

I have short-listed more poems that were under the cap than at the cap, and the reason is simple: the under-cap poem has already been edited. The at-cap poem has been written to a target, and the target is not the poem.

How to use the cap

Write the poem first, then cut to the cap. Do not write to the cap; write the poem and then cut it until it fits. The cut is the edit, and the edit is the craft.

Cut the weakest, not the latest. The line you added last is usually the line that is weakest. Cut it first. The poem that survives the cut is the poem that was always there.

Leave room under the cap. If the cap is a hundred lines, write eighty. The room is the proof that you cut on purpose, not because you had to.

Where the cap goes wrong

The trap is the poem that is written to the cap instead of written to be good. A poem that fills the cap is a poem that has been padded, and the padding is the first thing a judge sees. The cap is not a target; it is a ceiling, and the best poems stay well below it.

If you want to see the cut in action, the compression post has the method, and the contest window is open when the draft is ready. The cap is not the limit. It is the permission to cut.

Keep reading

For the craft side, the submission module covers the deeper method. The cutting module is the page to read next, and the sonnet module is where the work goes when it is done.

By Writory Editorial, for Writory.

Keep reading in the Writory Library

Enter a Writory poetry contest