Does Your Writing Matter?

Yes, less IS (often) more!

Dr.Mani
www.47hearts.com

Let me start with the fact that I wholeheartedly agree that the quality/importance/impact of the words is more important than the raw quantity.

Here's were I feel the need to pour more words on this, as ironic as that may be.

If frequency was all that was needed to generate "words that matter" then one would expect there to be more substance on sites like twitter and facebook than on a blog like this -- which does not appear to be the case. Or rather, there is not any consistency of substance. The signal to noise ratio is so low that whether the actual number of profound statements is larger they are often lost amongst the chatter.

And with similar arguments quantity by itself does us no good either if our goal is to have a positive impact with our words. The value I see in generating larger quantity of words is that once they are out of my head and on the page I can then work with them and distill the parts that matter out into a shorter (or longer!) form. Whatever the story we tell ourselves about how it works I've consistently done "brain dumps" and extracted meaningful ideas that I can then build upon.

The other thought that came to mind was Jack London's practice of writing 1000 words a day (or whatever the figure was) come rain or shine. The author who relayed that practice to me had taken up the habit of writing 2000 words a day of near final copy and had nearly a hundred books published, so it seems to work. Again, the arguments for how it works are irrelevant -- it just seems to work. Will every word matter? No, but it doesn't have to when there are another 999+ there to help it along.

And the final piece I feel led to share is the burden of only "allowing" words that matter. I write nearly every day and yet it may be weeks or months between blog posts for this very reason -- I often filter it as not mattering enough or generically not good/relevant/useful enough to post. This is a catch-22 in that by not allowing "failure" posts I am guaranteeing "failure" by not posting. (On the other side of that coin, I often lose great ideas because I don't set aside the time to fully develop them. Where is the balance between writing what matters and writing it well enough to communicate that it matters?)

***Part that matters:***
There is value in writing high quantity in order to generate the seeds of high quality, if for no other reason than it allows us to maintain the habit of writing. Consistently writing, whatever the initial quality, also makes it that much more likely that we have the awareness of what matters and the writing skills to polish them when the gems in the rough show up. The number of words is not *the* measure of value, yet volume often leads to the valuable parts that might otherwise never have been expressed.

And to paraphrase Pascal: I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the time to make it shorter.

Thanks for the thought provoking post Ryan!

Love this post, Ryan. So true!

Most of my writing is political writing rather than business, but it's still marketing, of ideas. I'm not prolific, and wish I could write faster, but I have seen the effect my writing creates on my readers.

Writing more frequently would be a good way for me to grow on this.