Is Less, More in Writing?

Writing websites normally give this advice to their users; when you write online, write less. People tend to surf net in a hurry. No one is going to pay any serious attention to your work if you write long. Long essays are a ‘pullback’ element in blogging, they’d say. All I have to say on this is every principle fails, occasionally, and in some unfortunate cases, always.

For a beginner, an advice to write short and crippled articles, or make short blog posts would be less short of exposure to nuclear radiation. He might find a bright light in the beginning, but the rest would be devastation.

Let us come to the point.

Writing sloppy and long is a very important exercise for a beginner. Writing every day and long is an evident accelerator to self-confidence as a writer. Writing less and aphoristic pieces are apt for a well-experienced and mature writer to try in his blogs or social media writing outlets.

Every advice has its own benefits and pitfalls. The advice to write less could be a bad advice for beginner. I’d say, write more to write less.

Writing long pieces would help a person in many ways. Here are four major areas that could be helped by writing long.

1. Produce base material to fall back on later.

Writing long provides an archive to the writer that he or she can use to edit or work later on. Editing a long work can be as gratifying as creative writing itself. Editing also helps defying the phenomenon called writers’ block. Some materials that surface in the writer’s conscious awareness, while writing long, can be useful in projects he or she undertakes later. Many writers testified that they encountered information, ideas, and wisdom they never thought existed in their minds, while writing. The first Indian writer to bring a Booker Prize in Literature home, Arundhathi Roy, said that her thoughts work when she writes.

2. Helps experimenting with voice.

Writing is an act of voicing. Finding the proper voice is as important for a writer as language. Writing long is the short cut to prep and pepper the voice.

3. Help track every dimension of the core topic.

Writing long is immensely helpful in a writer’s life in the clarity it provides to oneself about the ideas that wander in one’s head. At first, every work of words begins as a random flicker of thought, which then develops into a mess of vague ideas. From this stage, if the writer wants to move forward, the best chance he or she has is to write down every bit of idea related to the topic that comes to their mind. Once written down, these ideas are recorded. They can be used later. Writing down all the thoughts should include an action irrespective of importance, order, clarity, etc. Some ideas might seem largely different or divergent from the main topic. If this prevents the writer to write long, and in full truthfulness to whatever comes to his or her mind, the juicy and delicate part of your content could never be found again. They would forever be lost in the maize of your thoughts, because the best part of your thoughts would be hidden in the wilderness of ideas you had thought useless, in the beginning. There is always an editor’s desk to save your life, to cut down your long work short. However, no one else can fix whatever you haven’t put there, just because you are lazy or extra-careful or adherent to some advice on aphorism.

4. Boosts self-confidence.

Looking at the ten page first draft of your blog post or 25 thousand words of short story would make you feel proud, no doubt.

Write more, learn the craft, then write less or more—your take.