One Thousand Words – Abridged

Back in January I decided I would try out a writing advice from the famous novelist Stephen King, who talks about how you should write a thousand words each day, and to not even worry about quality, and then go back to edit it later. The idea being to get words written down, damn quality or any other factors that are stopping you from writing.

I don’t think I will ever write that much each and every single day, as I always micro-manage and edit myself as I write, but I figured I would at least try it out for one post.

I have since written several posts which exceeded 1000 words organically, my current record being a 1263 word long post about King Kong, but back then I thought that I would never write a post that long without intentionally trying to.

But editing yourself down is almost as important as getting your ideas written out, so I always planned to go back to edit this at some point.

And here we are!

 

Much of the original post was about issues I have when writing, mainly concerning technical and language problems.

While I am not as bothered by these issues anymore, I still have to look up the occasional English word, and I still have to go back and fix the mistakes my auto-correct makes.

But some issues persist, like my struggle with writing middles.

 

The middle of any written work is often much harder for me to write than the beginning or end. It is often easiest to come up with the end, as there is probably a big fun crescendo I have been working up to. Sometimes the endpoint is actually what I came up with in the beginning, and the rest is just set-up I use to justify that finale.

And the beginning may not be easy, as setting up characters or the introduction to an article can be very hard to write, but at least that is stuff you know has to be there. With the start you know you have to get the ball rolling, even if that in itself can be very hard.

But the middle is harder. It has to be interesting, so the reader won’t stop reading. It has to move the work from the starting position to where you want it to end up. Beyond that, you could fill it with anything. That sounds good, but in some ways limitations are a blessing. Limitations are a guard rail, a trail to follow. If you can go anywhere, you are likely to go nowhere.

And at the end of a 450 word abridged version of this post, that is where we have ended up..