I love writing. I write in two worlds – the world of accounting, and this one. In both of these worlds, brevity is highly regarded, and rightfully so! We are constantly connected, bombarded, and otherwise busy. We don’t have the time, patience, energy, or (let’s be honest) focus to meander through a wall of text or wandering thoughts.
We need to get to the point.
Unless of course your writing is a work of art, in which case we’re there for the experience, right?
I’m not sure – even accomplished authors need their novels to read clearly and concisely, and as I understand it, achieving this makes up a large chunk of the editing process.
This has been one of my greatest challenges in writing. For me, I think the issue is a mix of:
- Too much detail – definitions, caveats, technicalities, etc. This is especially true at work, and I think it comes from our first three years on the job. While articling, the majority of our writing was done in preparation for the Uniform Exam, which was sixteen hours of open-ended case questions. The goal was for students to demonstrate their depth and breadth of technical knowledge under time pressure. So you learned how to throw down everything you know, as fast as possible!
- Lack of focus – I write with a topic or general idea in mind, but without focus, that topic or idea could be linked to six other things. Those six things might have sub-topics of their own! So I start touching on all of them. At the same time.
- Impatience, ironically – I want to sit down and write, and so I tend to skip the upfront planning that is otherwise required for focus. I also tend to skip a lot of the editing required for brevity.
- Tonal darlings – especially when blogging, I tend to lock into a certain way of saying something because I like the tone of it. Does it really get to the point, though, or am I just going to have to explain the same thing in a different way further down?
At work, writing more (and more) concisely has been a decade-long process. I try to pay attention to it every time I open up a Word document or draft an email response. I observe how the office Masters of Clarity do it, and try to emulate their writing style. I actually like this aspect of my job! The allure of accounting lies in the challenge of taking complex ideas and condensing them into meaningful, digestible information.
Restriction fosters creativity!
I also love words, though, and I don’t often get a chance to play with writing at the office. So by the time I come here, I’m busting at the seams with ideas and words. This thwarts my efforts to write concisely on the blog, which has become more a form of expression than it is a vehicle for delivering clear, concise ideas. (Bad blogger, I know.)
I also have hard time following the conventional wisdom to “kill my darlings”.
Despite all that, and as I mentioned way back here, I have been trying to be a bit more succinct in an effort to accomplish a few goals which I see as falling into five different categories.
And in case you’ve thought it already – yes, I am painfully aware of how this post exemplifies the very issues I’m talking about. I’m just rolling with it. I’m sort-of hoping I’ll look back one day and joyfully write a concise little post about how far I’ve come since September 2024.
1 – Being useful
Possibly the best piece of advice I received when studying for those case-based accounting exams was to “be useful”. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But when you’re tackling an open-ended question, or if you’ve just got a lot of breadth and depth to cover, the advice to “be useful” can really help to focus your efforts.
Writing is about self-expression, sure, but doing it in a public forum means there’s inevitably a reader out there to consider. To me, my hope is that something on here will one day be useful to someone out there, so in order to achieve that, I ought to make these things readable.
2 – Efficiency in editing
It’s not easy keeping up with hobbies when you’ve got a 9-to-5 and young children at home, so if I’m going to try to do it all, I’m going to make it as efficient as possible!
Ironically, the theory is that the longer you spend editing, the more concise your writing becomes. Let me tell you though, it is really hard to edit a huge piece of meandering writing into something cohesive! If editing already takes a great deal of time and effort, why make it harder for myself?
For me and my meandering thoughts, editing often consists of reviewing my single document of many words, trying to identify the point(s) I was trying to make, and then carving them off into separate articles so that I can focus my thoughts a bit. That takes a fair amount of work in and of itself, but once I’ve done that, I’m now in the midst of editing three to five articles at the same time! Plus, once I’ve found my “point” for each, a bunch of re-writing is usually required.
This leads me to my next goal of…
3 – Eliminating half-baked posts
What’s wrong with a bunch of half-baked posts?
For me, unless I had made the conscious decision to sit on it, it becomes a point of distraction and a source of frustration throughout the week. It stays in the back of my mind begging to be wrapped up, but it’s not often that I can muster up the time or energy to finish it until the weekend. (That’s something else I’m working on.)
While having five ideas on the go is better than none, I’d still much prefer to start and finish just one within a week. Or better yet, a weekend!
Then I’m entering the work week feeling accomplished, and as a bonus, I’ve got the space available for that next idea to develop.
4 – Motivation and posting frequency
Given the limited time I have available to write in, my goal was to post every other week. I set that goal for myself mostly so that I wouldn’t just let the blog fall away (because I’ve found it’s shockingly easy to let the rest of life overtake your free time). It served as motivation to maintain some sort of creative outlet outside of office hours.
By now, I think I’ve created a habit for myself, so I don’t feel the need to post on a schedule anymore (because if I’m not writing, I’m probably engaging in some other creative activity). Still, I admit I enjoy feeling productive and maintaining a certain momentum.
It’s hard to maintain the feeling of momentum when I’ve found myself with a massive amount of editing to do, either on one huge meandering post or on five smaller posts that each need their own individual editing before I can move on to the next idea.
At that point I do try to work on one at a time, but as I work on one the other four are just sitting there in the background, waiting…
5 – Practice
It really doesn’t matter what you’re writing: text messages, emails, articles, instruction manuals, research – clear, concise writing is an immensely valuable skill. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use the skill I developed making leather book covers in any other context, but skills in writing are incredibly transferrable.
A hidden benefit to clear concise writing is also clear thinking. Writing is the expression of thought. One could even argue that writing and thought are inextricably linked! If you can learn to write clearly and concisely, I suspect you can teach yourself to think this way as well.
Come to think of it, I’ve been told that I’m a “divergent thinker” – which would explain my approach to writing. I don’t think divergent thinking is a bad thing; if anything, it’s quite creative. It’s just hard to then express the resulting thoughts in a digestible manner. I (ironically) digress.
Writing concisely and with focus: things I’ve tried
Admittedly, I’ve just been having too much fun to take my clear and concise writing ambitions seriously, but a couple things I’ve tried include:
Separating long articles into individual posts
It feels like an arduous task, but I think if anything it has helped me explore what’s going on in my thought process and observe some pattern and structure in there. It’s not something I intend to continue doing, if I can help it!
Now that I’ve experienced the joy of freewriting, I think I’m ready to dial it back a bit and create some structure with a bit of planning and outlining. I suspect mind maps will be my new friend.
Creating a series
Somewhat related to above, I did try giving myself a little structure by trying to create a “series”, which was intended to give myself permission to write a bunch of shorter bits that were all related.
My first attempt was Making Spaces. It was fun, and it worked somewhat – it was particularly good for idea generation and then following through on each idea sequentially. I ran into a roadblock where I wasn’t sure if some of the ideas I had originally planned actually made sense as part of the series. So I overthought those, and then ran out of steam.
My second attempt was all about authenticity, my intention word for the year. (If you’re curious, links to all of the posts can be found part-way through this post, being the last in that series.) I hadn’t originally set out with the intent of making a series – this was one of those situations where I started happily freewriting, and then realized I was trying to make too many points at once. So I stopped myself part-way through and turned it into a series, hoping I would enjoy producing a bunch of shorter posts more quickly.
I’m not sure if that one worked – that last post in the series ended up a 2,800 word behemoth.
I also realized after the fact that “series” are really just like focused post tags or categories. No need to overcomplicate things.
What I’m trying next
Apart from the conventional wisdom to outline my posts, I had a couple more ideas:
Borrowing from business writing
Exactly what am I borrowing? What came to mind was the structure of the idea more than anything.
Rarely in business am I writing meandering thoughts about a vague idea. I am usually writing to answer a very specific question, or to provide solutions to a very specific problem. Everything is purposeful, and everything has a scope limitation.
I will have to play with this idea a bit and see what works, because business writing also has a certain feel to it that is different than what I’m going for from here. The trick would be to maintain an authentic voice while still borrowing brevity from the wonderful world of business writing. (She alliterates ironically. See!? Too much fun being had here!)
For this to work, I need to start with a question or a specific problem, and then address it. This is in contrast to my current approach, which basically starts with “an answer”. An answer to what?
Spontaneous writing
Yes, I did say that just sitting down and freewriting is part of the problem! However, there must be away to do it successfully and succinctly. A lot of what I write has been advice, discoveries, and big ideas. Spontaneous writing hasn’t worked well for these.
But it would work for little musings!
Personally, I like reading little musings and personal insights on blogs, and I think I’ll enjoy writing them (if I ever get to it). It reminds me of my approach to painting – I know I could plan from thumbnails all the way through to a finished piece, but it’s a lot of fun just putting paint to paper and seeing what happens in an hour.
It keeps the creativity flowing and unlocks those blocks!
I can tell you already that this will be a challenge. This very post started as a 163 word anecdote attached to a completely unrelated post, and one day I thought what a great opportunity to expand this into a little musing!
It’s like I tripped and fell into another 1,800 words.
That’s all for today (or this week, as it turned out). Until next time, when I hope to see you more frequently but in shorter doses. 🙂
