I’ve been experimenting over the past couple months with writing 1000 words a day. I found that I didn’t like that, feeling it was too long. So I dropped it to a minimum of 500 words a day. That felt a lot better.
Sometimes I write more than that, like my most recent post, Find the D/s balance in relationships, a nice 2,375 words.
But as I write, and as I read and learn more about writing, I’m feeling that the concept of ‘less is more’ is a much better one than ‘try to write hundreds or thousands of words and hope to keep people interested…’
I’ve also found that sometimes I just want to write a few sentences, or a paragraph or two, but I discourage myself with the fact they’re not the minimum 500 words, so I avoid writing them.
But what if they become some of my best and most discussed posts? What if the beauty and the quality is also in the simplicity?
I was just reading this post, 5 Quick-Start Tips To Help Improve Your Writing, and #2 talked about ‘keep it short’. It led to this post, The 400 word promise, which led to The beauty of small.
This point is probably the most applicable for me:
Smaller posts don’t take as much time to write or read, which is good for a lazy blogger. And a busy reader.
I know that I’m not a lazy blogger, but I also know many of my readers are busy readers. The longer a post is, the less chance there is that they’ll read all of it.
I also know that this is part of the reason for writing 500 or 1000 word posts every day – to improve my writing so that it’s compelling and encourages the reader to keep reading.
But what if they just don’t have the time? What if they just want the message without all the fluff?
These are questions I ask myself as I write every day. I want to become a better writer, but is a minimum of 500 words every day the only way?
I don’t think so. In fact, I knew it wasn’t ‘the way’ even when I started. It’s just a methodology, a style, a pattern of behaviour designed to encourage and enforce better writing on a regular basis.
One of the things I don’t ever want to do is force myself into a corner with just one way of doing things, and end up being blind to other ways. I don’t want to lose interest in my writing because I restrict myself.
And I’ve realised today that I don’t want to prevent the beauty that can come from simplicity by forcing myself to choose complex instead.
So I’m once again changing my rules. I can do that, ’cause I’m in the one in charge here.
This is about my journey, and my writing is a journey. It’s going to change over time.
I’ve always liked the idea of choosing simplicity. I like the idea of improving my writing too, so this ‘evolution’ of how I want to do things is going to be as follows:
I’ll write whatever the hell I want, however long I want it. And I’ll write more than one post a day, if I feel like it.
And now this post is 563 words. That’s funny.
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