Asymptomatic

Why Can't It?

January 10, 2009 5:48pm · 4 Comments · and

My writing queue is a mile long, and a year overdue. I've got ideas aplenty, a paradox of choice, and an imagined readership (not in its quantity, but its consistency) that demands perfection.

I've just noticed, moments ago, that the blogs I most enjoy reading these days are short. Three paragraphs convey their entire message. Most of the time, the message is a simple impression. You read it and you feel... a certain way. It's like sense memory -- a whiff of a stranger's prose puts you in a familiar place.

Continues here →

Clearly, I need to write more like that, but leave room for the bigger questions that often fill this space. Some new rules for authoring, which I'll feel free to break soon after I write them: No writing without music. Less thinking, more feeling. Fiction works, with warning. Short and sweet.

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Comments

  1. For what it's worth, I enjoy reading your long-form posts. You have an insight and a focus that I admire, and your longer posts almost always prompt me to think about things in new ways. I like that.

    Of course, I enjoy your creative side, too, so I wouldn't complain if I saw more short-form, emotional posts here. It would be a nice variety, and equally thought-provoking.

    Speaking solely for myself, I find it hard to switch back and forth between long- and short-form writing. On my personal blog, I've spent the last year or so intentionally writing longer pieces. I try to deliberate more, prepare my thoughts, and provide something worth reading. In my writing for that gadget website, I struggle to distill paragraphs of information down to just a few quick sentences. I don't have the snark that the other writers have mastered, so writing for that site is much more laborious for me. In part, it's because I often don't really care about the gadgets I'm covering, but also because I feel such pressure to get something decent published as soon as possible (the gadget blog business is very time-sensitive).

    I'll read nearly anything you have to write, but do please keep some long-form analysis in your content. :)

  2. My log posts are unlikely to go anywhere. I'm a creature of habit, after all. I just need to remember that it's ok to post a 3-paragraph post on the days in-between, and that will keep up my motivation for the longer posts.

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