While I post occasionally here, in terms of long term writing projects it is fascinating seeing how my own works have progressed over the decades.
I must have initially written about 10 incomplete (80,000 word+) books - only to get into the last 20% of it and get that moment of "nobody would really want to read this!" I think some of them have survived the deletion process.
Then it moved into smaller form, 1,000 word posts once a month on a blog I ran for about 3 years. Even that felt like a little too much.
The one I have been working on for the last few years, unpublished, I describe as a thousandth of a shadow of the Tao Te Ching. Little sayings and expressions that can be communicated in under 20 seconds. They aren't original ideas just ones that I think will be useful to others. So far I have 86 of them.
I guess it comes down to a saying in Buddhism, "a thousand words mean nothing compared to a single word that can bring peace." It also comes down to a case of, in distilling down to core concepts that aren't spelled out in detail, it allows the reader to flex their own mental muscles. It also reduces the attack surface area to some degree.
I know of a few folks now that believe that if you cannot impart the core aspects of something, particularly in terms of politics and philosophy, in less than a half dozen paragraphs - you need to keep working on it. Essentially, if you cannot communicate it clearly, is your thinking clear?
One of these sayings on my list is, 'Don't count the words - make the words count.'.
I must have initially written about 10 incomplete (80,000 word+) books - only to get into the last 20% of it and get that moment of "nobody would really want to read this!" I think some of them have survived the deletion process.
Then it moved into smaller form, 1,000 word posts once a month on a blog I ran for about 3 years. Even that felt like a little too much.
The one I have been working on for the last few years, unpublished, I describe as a thousandth of a shadow of the Tao Te Ching. Little sayings and expressions that can be communicated in under 20 seconds. They aren't original ideas just ones that I think will be useful to others. So far I have 86 of them.
I guess it comes down to a saying in Buddhism, "a thousand words mean nothing compared to a single word that can bring peace." It also comes down to a case of, in distilling down to core concepts that aren't spelled out in detail, it allows the reader to flex their own mental muscles. It also reduces the attack surface area to some degree.
I know of a few folks now that believe that if you cannot impart the core aspects of something, particularly in terms of politics and philosophy, in less than a half dozen paragraphs - you need to keep working on it. Essentially, if you cannot communicate it clearly, is your thinking clear?
One of these sayings on my list is, 'Don't count the words - make the words count.'.