What Is This “Concise” You Speak Of?

I’ve gotten so lax with posting regularly. It’s more difficult than I thought, this blogging malarkey. Certainly, it’s far more time-consuming. I keep telling myself that I should write shorter posts – if I spend less time writing them, I’d surely write more. And they’d be quicker to read, which, I’m told, is The Key with regards to sharing just about anything on the internet. There’s an abbreviation to prove it: “TLDR”, meaning “too long, didn’t read”. So it must be true.

I’m not going to tell you how long I spend crafting an average post, but I can assure you, it is too long by far. I was never any good at being concise. There were kids in school who were forever in trouble for not producing enough work, skimping on word or page counts and turning in the bare minimum wherever they thought they could get away with it; I was the opposite. I was consistently told I was writing too much, turning in fat bundles of ink-smudged A4 when we’d been asked to write a single page. English exams were a real issue – or rather, the time constraints were.

I’m the same when I talk. I’m not the sort of talkative where I’m constantly chatting – I can be quite quiet (believe it or not) – but when I am talking, I always have so much to say. If I’m telling a story, my digressions have digressions. I’ll go off on about six tangents before I get to the probably-pretty-simple point I started off trying to make. Whatever mental filter we’re supposed to be fitted with to sort out the extraneous detail from the important stuff, I wasn’t there when they got handed out.

Don’t get me wrong, I probably could recount an anecdote briefly. I’m sure I could keep my writing succinct. But, to me, all those extra details are what bring a story to life. Everything is so much less colourful without them.

And apart from anything else, I love words. I love how you can exchange one word for an almost-identical synonym and entirely change the feeling of the sentence. I love how you can purposefully paint a particular picture in someone else’s mind with a few carefully-chosen adjectives. I love the subtle power of alliteration. And of metaphor, and simile, and repetition, and all those many, many other tools in the vast arsenal available to anyone who wishes to put them to use. In short, I love words far too much to use less of them.

So, ironically, I’ve written a short post here, about not being able to write short posts – but don’t expect many more of the same. It’s just not in my nature. Sorry!*

* I’m not at all sorry.