in blogging, general |

Quick Read: Write Less

Fewer words are fine. Social-length posts are fine. Link blogs are fine. You get to keep your own output, where you want it, and the form it takes is entirely up to you.

You only need to give yourself permission.

Write Less, by Matt Gemmell

This makes so much sense to me!

This is what digital gardens and second brains are all about – quick notes that coalesce into something greater, because you keep going back to the tool over and over, thinking through it instead of on it, or outside of it.

Goes well with my post about how you shouldn’t Moleskin your blog.

via Colin Walker

I was once described as a philosopher programmer. I think I'd like to describe myself as a lifelong student.

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  • Replied to Write Less by Matt Gemmell (Matt Gemmell — Thriller, Horror, and Suspense author)

    We took away our own permission to write less, unless it was on someone else’s network.
    There’s a pervasive and unwritten convention about this now. On social, content of any length at all is fine — and indeed the maximum allowed length is often very short, which reinforces the association. So, perniciously, our eager-to-simplify brains have decided that the converse is true for blogs: you can write only longer, weightier stuff.

    Everywhere I read I see McLuhan these days, maybe I should actually read him 😂
    But really, I absolutely feel this:

    Those who do blog will often sit on pieces for too long, because they’re waiting until they have more to say — or they shelve pieces entirely, wrongly believing they’re too brief and thus somehow trivial.

    I’m trying to think of blogging in terms of the scientific community: every commentator adds a new piece, a new angle, and every little bit further understanding boosts the whole community. Together we rise, whether any one person’s blog post causes a large shift in the community’s thinking or not. It’s like the way geology happens: the landscape changes both a little bit at a time, slowly, and cataclysmically. Our thinking and writing can be accretive to others, it needn’t be explosive to be of value.
    Another silly thing I’ve shelved posts for: being too slow to respond, feeling as if I’ve missed the cultural moment of discussion around a piece.
    Via Nitin Khanna.