May 05 2009
Making Your Words Worthwhile
It’s easy enough to churn out words, but making them mean something is hard, and making them mean something and getting it across without losing your reader or boring them to death–that is the greatest trick of all.
I had a college professor who was fond of saying that you should take a “cliche rake” to your writing, and another who would advise you to trim sentences out of paragraphs so that your overall story was reduced by several pages. She often said that if she told you to write something that was 8-10 pages she would rather you turn in 7 good pages than fill an extra page or more with fluff to make up your page count.
I think the same problem is had by many bloggers. You become more enamored with churning out content that you don’t actually worry about what’s written there. As I’ve been going through condensing and re-arranging my blogs so that they’re not completely full of redundant content I’ve seen a lot of that. There are so many entries that I read and I wonder “What was I thinking?” “Why did I even bother posting that?”
This blog is going to be about my writing journey from now on. However I’m hoping to transfer my new ideas about writing to all of my blogs so that the content on them is worthwhile as well as well-written. There should be NO CHAFF.