More words, not less
Over the last decade or so, most of my writing has been for magazines. As a result I have become quite adept at writing within the constraints of word count and deadlines. It is often said that our attention span in this digital and ‘social’ world is less than that of a goldfish, which is claimed to be 9 seconds. It seems this is actually a myth – both our attention span and that of a goldfish, as explored in the paper Are We No Better Than A Goldfish? by Jules M Epstein.
Regardless, I do find that the distractions are greater and it is getting harder and harder to be disciplined in where and how I focus my attention, with the multitude of things demanding and designed to sap that attention.
In the book The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life, Allison Fallon writes, “The act of focusing our attention on a single thing (or at least attempting to do so) reveals to us how distracted we’ve been all along.”
When SEO, clickbait and writing for the internet became all the rage, I was editor of Destiny Man, a men’s business and lifestyle magazine. We had to attend workshops on ‘writing for SEO’ and the ‘performance’ of our articles on the website was constantly monitored. We were often pulled back into meetings to discuss and determine why said performance left much to be desired. My standpoint was that it was crappy writing – I used a stronger word - because we were constantly thinking about keywords and the like, which took away from the soul/essence of the writing.
I also continued to blog, erratically, on my website, which has never really received the kind of visits and/or engagement that would be considered ‘successful’. That could also be a result of the inconsistency of my posting. I did do a couple of 30-day blogging challenges and the metrics improved during that period but often life got (or I allowed it to get) in the way and I would eventually and return to ad hoc posting.
At some stage, I thought the thing to do would be to take a page out of Seth Godin’s approach; he has published short, focused posts daily since January 2002. Then I allow myself to get distracted and shift focus to other things. Plus there is the debate about length and format of writing for online. While shorter has been held up as better because of the noise and aforementioned ‘short attention span’, the SEO plugin on Wordpress recommends articles of longer than 300 words. Yet Seth Godin’s blog has worked, in my view, because it is built on short. And the fact that he maintained it on his blog while the rest of us were caught up in platforms like twitter, sharing a multitude of thoughts, which would, in some instances, be better suited to more than whatever number of characters you can have on social media. Plus it is a space that he owns, which is something I always encourage my clients to do – let your owned and own space be the springboard to work from.
A friend recently reminded me on a newsletter – Ramblings – that I had in the early 2000s. I would type my thoughts up on a Blackberry and email it out. It was short, instant, and helped me exercise the writing muscle. It was, essentially, a precursor to this newsletter, which has had several iterations on different platforms.
I am now in a space where I feel I should be writing more words, not less, in sharing my thoughts, views, perspectives, etc. I am trying to take a bit more time with the things that I write, instead of just popping them out the minute I am done. Being more deliberate and patient, coming back to thoughts, thrashing them out and editing several times before even considering publishing.
For many of us, monetisation isn’t really an option with spaces like Substack using Stripe which isn’t supported anywhere on the African continent. It means being clear on why we put our scribblings out into the world. I am trying to remember the why. I am trying to reconnect with my energy and spirit in the early days of blogging on Myspace and Blogger when the drive was simply to share, things I came across, experiences that resonated, objects that fascinated me, etc.
In a way, I lost sight of this. As platforms came and went, the conversations became about monetisation, and branding, and positioning and the like. I write for a living and have been doing it for so long that I have forgotten how to simply write for me, write for thinking, write because I can. I used to write two to three poems a day, mostly crappy, but it was fulfilling in its own way. Now, I can't write a poem to save my life.
But, I am going to try and sit with my writing for longer. Suppress the desire to share for long enough to not be driven by algorithms, and likes, and comments.
Wish me luck.
Kojo