justing.net

Too Many Words

By Justin G. on 22JUN14TUE

Again, with the power prompt today there was too much material. Here is the current recipe:

1. Write what happened. This can be brief.
2. Write why it happened, if it needs motivating.
3. Write about what I think it means, if that is something that I spent time thinking about.
4. If necessary, write about the context. That might have something to do with the above.

It turns out that a lot happens on an ordinary Monday. I don’t think that I am being too detail oriented either. I guess I need to be more efficient with my words? I suspect that as a writer this is a good problem to have, so I’ll keep working that particular problem. I’d like to get through the whole day; there are things that are worth writing about in the later part of the day too.

Here are a couple of things to try tomorrow:

• Write the shortest possible recounting. Just the events. These are like the notes of the day, from memory.
• Pick the things that seem worth diving deeper into first, and write about those. Trouble is that it’s not always obvious what I’m going to get when I start unwrapping some thing that happened.
• Make those notes of the sequence while it’s happening? Just the briefest possible notes.
• Go in reverse order. Might be weird to do. Might be worth it anyway.

I’ll also finally get around to reading the next chapter in Writing Life Stories sometime soon.

↝ morrow

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