I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time.
— French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain
Too many words are shared online. I feel it myself, not just in how much I produce (most of which is just for my own education), but also in the newsletters cluttering my inbox.
Articles seem to be getting longer and longer, partly because AI makes it so easy to produce voluminous text that seems meaningful. But no one wants to actually read those articles.
People publish overly lengthy thoughts everwhere — on LinkedIn, on Substack, on Twitter/X (now that you can publish long-form articles there), on their own blogs. And I’m a part of that voluminati, people who write too much, producing volume because it’s easier than saying something briefly.
Readers are becoming disenchanted with newsletters, especially those hosted on Substack (where excess volume seems especially, well, excessive):
Much of the volume is regurgitated AI slop which means people gradually stop reading it:
What is the solution?
I am imagining going the opposite way on my Substacks. Writing less and more compressed instead of more. Avoiding anything that AI wrote (I mostly do that already, though I use it for background research and sometimes don’t digest the background enough myself before including it in my articles).
Some options for reducing volume
Write a haiku or a sonnet instead?
Haikus have 17 syllables organized in three unrhyming lines of five, seven, and five syllables.
A sonnet is a 14-line poem, usually written in iambic pentameter (ten syllables that alternate stressed unstressed) with a rhyminb scheme ABABABAB CDCDCDCD where the sense is carried forward in a new direction after the midway break.
I like this idea, but it would be a lot of work… unless I used AI to do it! Ugh.
Write a long-form article and then have AI compress it?
That seems like something that would make people upset, and it takes away the human voice.
Write an article and then compress it myself into one paragraph?
That seems more useful, for me, and for potential readers.
Accept that complicated ideas often take multiple paragraphs to communicate?
Probably the most realistic and least interesting approach to take.
Cutting back on writing
In a recent Tarot reading, I received guidance to drop some of my various projects and venues in order to focus better on what really matters to me.1 That advice resonated with me because I know I’m doing too many things; I’m scattered. But I don’t really want to give anything up. I enjoy my constant creativity.
But I do feel like putting more structure about how often I write and where could be helpful. I absolutely still believe in quantity creativity, but it needs to be combined with quasi-quitting.
I need, in Julia Keller’s words describing quasi-quitting, “a slight but crucial recalibration of strategies.”
I don’t know what that looks like. Not yet.
- I use Tarot not as fortunetelling or truth but to give me some randomized intuitive inspiration. ↩︎