Writing Long Articles
Let me first start by stating that I am an exceedingly talkative person. I am known for my long monologues to explain a simple story. I always have troubles going straight to the point and often end up going way too much in details.
However, after writing close to 15 articles, I realize that my articles usually don’t go above the 500 words mark.
This has gotten me to think about the difference between my writing and speaking. How can a story that would take 1 min to explain takes 10 while an article that could take 2000 words ends up in 400?
I guess I am probably not the first one to experience this. And this is why you will find below 5 reasons that we may have to overcome to become better writers.
1. Organization of thoughts
When I talk, I believe that I will tend to just blurr out and give out details which may not be useful to the story itself. I think that this gives more substance to the story itself but people around me will usually just tell me that those are pointless details.
It may be for this reason that I try (as much as I can) to go straight to the point when I write. I spend time on organizing my thoughts and in the end, I will skill details which could have been of interest.
But should details be overlooked every single time? I don’t think so but my subconscious tends to go on overdrive to limit details, which then makes my articles be shorter than they could.
2. Taking Time Away
While this used to be a lesser known fact in the past, in recent years we have all come to know that our attention span has lowered a great deal. It feels close to impossible to concentrate on one action at a time and most people will read in diagonal. Like everybody, I skim through articles to find the information that interests me and I will read all of it only if some parts caught my attention.
However, if the article is small, I may just read it in its entirety directly. Time is precious and long articles do take some time to read. I believe that this may be why I tend to write smaller articles too. Subconsciously, I fear that I will take time away from the reader.
But if you have clicked on an article, then this means that the title attracted you. So instead of making an article smaller, I guess it should just be made more attracting so that people will keep on reading. Then making it long wouldn’t be a problem.
3. Misunderstanding of “My Time”
As a new blogger, there are still only a few people reading what I post (thank you very much for this!). As someone rather impatient, I think I may have trouble to think that this is enough. I want my articles to interest, make others think and want to improve themselves.
However, the time put in writing articles almost daily clearly does not (yet, hopefully) converts into “enough” readers. And while the act of writing itself is fun and interesting to me, I tend to consider that the amount of time put in writing shouldn’t be too long if not too many people intend on reading my posts.
Most people say “I have better things to do”. But what if this was the better thing to do from the beginning? I think I should try to forget about the amount of readers and concentrate on you, the people reading this article and be thankful for this. Enjoying the process in itself is the most important after all!
4. A Little is better than Nothing
In all my research to write better, a common advice is “post every day, no matter how little you write“. I agree entirely with this as this allows me to think about new topics, new set up of posts, etc. on a daily basis.
But on the contrary, this also makes me end up not having the time to write long articles. Reading long articles more and more and appreciating them is making me think that my own articles should be longer to have a stronger impact as well but for this to be true, I should have a better understanding of my own writing and of the topics I try to tackle.
For now, I need to keep in mind the saying “better is the enemy of good” and just write. Not writing is the biggest enemy to improvement. I will keep on writing and, one day, my articles may end up being long and inspiring.
5. Wanted the “New”
I like to think that whatever I may think of or look for will be on the internet somewhere. No matter how weird something is, if you think about it, then someone else has and you can find it.
So trying to write something new is complicated. The more you write, the higher the probability of ending up on a fact or story told somewhere else. This can’t be avoided though. So making sure you just follow the flow of your thoughts, use your own experiences, the higher the chance to keep your article unique.
All this being said, look at this! This article in itself is a great example of this last reason as this is some rambling of my own experience and it ended up being my longest article!
The most important is certainly to enjoy the process and not overthink what writing is. As long as we keep a fresh and open mind on the act of writing, I am sure we can all surpass the above stops!
What about you? Have you ever found a limit for yourself when you were writing? If yes, how did you do to overcome it?
Originally published at yuhakko.wordpress.com on November 26, 2018.
