Coming up with things to say? Easy. Finding the time to write them down? Moderately easy. Being able to translate those thoughts into succinct words without 10 paragraphs of waste? Not so easy.
Given the amount of posts I have published in 2015 alone, you could be forgiven for thinking that I find writing somewhat easy. I have no shortage of ideas and things to write about, I have at current count 12 unpublished ideas sitting in my unpublished documents folder, most of those probably will never see the light of day.
The reality is: writing is fucking hard. To quote the startup mantra, “it’s not the idea, it’s the execution” – anyone can come up with an idea, it’s how you go about taking that idea and turning into something measurable that is the hard part.
This post I am trying to write right now should not be that long. But here we are, four paragraphs in and I am rambling. I will not edit this out, but it highlights the dilemma that I and a multitude of others face when trying to jot down their thoughts into an easy to digest and succinct post.
Leaving out the fluff and focusing on the main point is an incredibly hard thing for me to do. I find I can easily write upwards of 4 or 5 paragraphs before the main point of the article is revealed, all while the reader is probably impatiently sitting there saying, “get to the fucking point Dwayne, sheesh” – it can be difficult to know how to start a post and where it should end. Maybe I just do not think things out properly before I start writing about them.
So lets end it here. The next time you read something I have written, you should know that it probably took me a few days of on and off editing to get it to the stage I am ready to hit the publish button. Even after I publish something, it is not uncommon for me to edit it a few times.
Writing is hard. But I usually find that just spitting out the words and then editing later is far more worthy of my time. Granted I don’t write technical things, mostly because I have nothing new to add to what’s already been said. My friend calls it a brain dump. She does one everyday just spits out all her thoughts and later she can go back and reorganize and elaborate and share. I personally like when an article is more than just technical hey here is the point. We are human, I like to see the side ways paths our minds go.
You raise a very valid point Alicia. Maybe sometimes it is better to say things how they come out instead of filtering them down. I think a lack of knowing a subject well can have the same effect. If you struggle to understand something before you write about it, you are probably more likely to write more than you need to convince not only the reader, but yourself you know what you are talking about.
I do enjoy spotting different writing styles, words are words, but there is something special and unique in how people put them together. Thanks for stopping by.