Link: http://weblog.tetradian.com/2012/09/05/why-i-write-long-posts/
In case you hadn’t noticed, yes, I do tend to write long posts.
Sorry…
There are folks around who are real masters of succinct writing. Seth Godin, for example.
And I’ll have to admit I’m not good at writing succinct summaries. There’s a lot of craft and skill that goes into Seth’s pithy phrasings: and I just ain’t got that kind of craft or skill. (Or time, for that matter: it takes a long time to write that short.)
Sorry…
Yet even Seth writes long sometimes. (Or long-ish, anyway.) He writes long when the content needs to be long. When the content needs context, background, argument, explanation.
And there’s nothing to be sorry about there.
Most of what I write about is in that second category: it needs to be long. It’s exploratory, uncertain; a lot of it is ‘thinking out loud’ about some knotty, gnarly problem where the answer would pop out on its own, without any trouble at all, if only we could find the right way to phrase the question.
That’s the core of it, right there: answers are easy – finding the question is what’s hard.
So yes, I ramble at times (too often?). I look at things from many different angles (too many?). I search for subtleties (too subtle?) that hide somewhere (where?) in the spaces (what spaces?) between the building-blocks of the narrative. Sure, I often have an egregiously alliterative attitude to grammar, but the carelessness is actually a lot more careful than it looks: I’m searching for the knowledge behind the narrative, where the only tool I have is narrative itself. Right down the rabbit-hole, if I’m not darn careful… with a real risk of taking others down the rabbit-hole in all that rabbiting-on, too.
It’s what I do, though; part of who I am. Sorry…
Yet that long writing does get somewhere, even if somewhat slowly, in its long-winded way. There’s a lot here on this website, including ideas and tools and techniques that you won’t find anywhere else: SCAN and Enterprise Canvas, to give just two examples. Yet because I do write long, what you’ll also find here is all of the thinking behind those tools and techniques – which makes it easier for you to work out how to use them (or not-use them) in your own context. That matters: it matters a lot, in real-world practice.
That’s why I write long. There are plenty of other places where you can go for short, succinct, prepackaged answers: and if that’s what you need, you’d be better off there than here. But if those predefined answers don’t work for you, and what you need is a better understanding of the questions, then that’s what this space is about.
And that’s something I don’t need to apologise for.
Hope it helps, anyway: let me know, perhaps?
