Word After Word

Ron said “This is how you do the blog. Get everything you want to say in ten words. Ten word sentences.”

I love an assignment. I love short writing. I love structures and strictures and word counts and forms. And I know the blog entries are long, so so long. “Ten words?” I said. “Like CNN?”

“Yeah.” He said it would be an art and really good this way. He talked about the company president who is mad because no one is reading his blog; the entries are pages long. “One screen max. Preferably less,” said Ron. I counted his words. Five. 

I absolutely agree. When it comes to writing—the shorter the better.

But what I love about the blog is I can publish anything I want to. I don’t have to take a ton of time to make the pieces shorter. I can do them however I want. They are long because I do not have time to make them shorter; the blog is my journal, a rambling conversation with students and friends, a multi-sided private-public process. I don’t care if any reads any of it or some or all.

I thrive on daily writing. The blog gives a shape to that process and it amplifies the process. The blog takes a two-dimensional thing and gives it if not depth spaciousness. It doesn’t need to be read to matter. I’m not doing it to be read, I’m doing it to write.

This is what I love about my students, who can’t understand Anne Lamott’s chapters on jealousy and publication. Be jealous of another writer? The concept escapes them entirely. It would be like being jealous of a fish or a tree. Write to publish? My students write because they love to write.  

This post in ten words? We should do our writing just how we want to.