"'State Of The Blog' Interlude"

Heading into my 12^th year of writing this blog – by far the longest job I have ever held if you can call this unpaid undertaking a job and I do – I thought I’d take a moment to consider this odd and original – I’d like to believe – way of pleasantly passing the time.   

Okay.

What am I doing?  And how am I doing it?

The “What?” part is easy.  An idea comes to me, and, after “whatever it takes” hours of elaborating and shaping, I publish the finished product on my blog, hoping the people who blunder into this venue enjoy it.

The best reader reaction I ever received was, “You throw gold out the window.”  I don’t know.  It’s very flattering, but come on, “Gold”?  What I’d be truly content with regularly accomplishing is this:

An honest and readable reflection of what I was trying to convey. 

And how well am I… wait.  lemme say this.

When it comes to the “What?” – meaning the content of this blog – I am enthusiastically open to outside suggestion.  As with most people – possibly all of them – I do not think about what I do not think about.  And I only write about what I do. 

If there is something I forgot about that you’re interested in hearing about, let me know.  Maybe I forgot about it by mistake. 

Now…

When it comes to the “how” of this exercise – the “stylistic expression”, if you will – well, that’s pretty much “on me.”  (So no comments, “Write different!”)

I am, however, concerned, taking stock entering my twelfth year of doing this, that I have, at least somewhat, lost my stylistical direction.

Specifically, many of my blog posts are too long.  Revisiting my recently reprised “Christmas Chestnuts”, I was disturbed by how extended those posts were and how much could have easily been edited out.

“Twelfth Year Resolution”:  I am determined to “write shorter.”

By which, I hopefully also mean “better.”

Let me explain how “too long” happened.

No.  First, this.

From my earliest professional outings, writing weekly columns in the newspaper not dissimilar to this, I intended to tell stories on paper – which evolved into cyber-paper – that would feel like you and I are together someplace, and I am telling you a story.  Simple, (hopefully) interesting, and narratively complete.  The plan, compressed to a fare-the-well:

I wanted to “write talk.”

The thing is,

Taking that intention literally, well…  you can “write talk”,

But it will be virtually unreadable.

I have mentioned a book called The Essential Lenny Bruce – literal transcriptions of Lenny’s cumulated performances, turned into a book. 

Which I bought and by which I was thoroughly let down.

The transcriber did their best to convey the tone, tenor and timing… and those are just the “T’s”… of Lenny’s classic performances.  The thing is, no matter how hard they tried – the pause-reflecting “three dots”, the emphasizing italics, the SCREAMING CAPITALIZATIONS – they could not successfully do that.  With literal transcription, you miss everything but the words. 

So there’s a conundrum.  Your intention is to come genuinely "alive" in your communications.  “Literal transcription” seems like it would work, but disappointingly doesn’t.

The most effective alternative?

You write “simulated talk.”

Writing that convincingly sounds like it’s “talk, but it isn’t.

That’s what I do.

The problem is, as with every cobbled solution, there is a subsequent problem.   The subsequent problem here is,

“Simulated talk” is a “hybrid.”

Triggering the subsequent problem of “proportion”; to wit, how much “writing” and how much “talk”?

And once you include “writing” to any extent, the subsequent problem then is,

Exactly what kind of “writing” is it going to be?

More about that the next time.

Because I am trying to write shorter.