Blogging lends itself to short electric bursts of writing - longer than a typical Twitter message, but still shorter than what typically goes into an extended discourse on a topic. Many of my blog entries are impossibly short, just a few words that hint at a topic and move on.
Every so often it's worthwhile to step back and realize that just because the input box on your screen has room for 140 words doesn't mean you can't drag it a bit larger and make it handle 500 words or more at one go. With practice, you can even start to organize your work and your thinking so that not all of it fits on the single page. After all, the internet doesn't fit on one page any more, and you're used to vacuuming up ideas and connecting them together in unexpected ways. This would be no different.
It's also OK to start writing, fill up a page, and then hack away at the text so that half of it is gone by the time you are done. The "shitty first draft" that Anne Lamott writes about depends crucially on the ability of the writer to suppress their editorial instincts just long enough to get something down that covers the page, without worrying too much that the words are precisely or even approximately useful. Filling the page with ink assures you that at least a few of the words are reusable, that some colorful combination of characters makes for a scrap or snippet usable elsewhere, or just that the brain has been kicked into writing mode long enough to live there for a while and turn off the edit mode that threatens to erase it.
It's OK not to have every bit of writing be a bite-sized gem. For one thing, not every complex subject lends itself to sparkling insights. You may have to slog through dozens of detailed examples to convince the reader that there's something going on which is worth their extended attention, in ways that don't all unfold in neat crystalline format.
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