Keeping To The Point

I need to learn brevity.

That sentence was all I was going to say on the subject. An ironic, hopefully amusing post that kept to the point and sort-of-illustrated it perfectly.

But I had to keep writing. And that, precisely, is the problem.

Once, at school, we did an exercise in summarising. Highlight the most relevant points in a given article. The teacher expected us to find twenty or so. I picked out closer to fifty.

I never know when enough information becomes too much information. I talk with friends about ideas for creative projects, but rather than summarising the idea in one catchy sentence I explode in a torrent of stream-of-conscious thoughts and expect them to pick out salient points.

Any number of psychological observations could probably be extracted from that, but in a break from tradition I’m going to avoid trying to list them all.

I like information. I want to pass on information. If I’m seeking an opinion on an idea, it only seems right that I illuminate that idea as fully as possible. Or is that a way of trying to bully people into accepting it; some demonstration of ‘look how much thought I’ve put into this, so please indulge my unspoken desire for acceptance’?

Look, you see, I’ve started the list…

I don’t know if brevity can be learned, but I want to explore the topic further. Maybe, now that I seem to have a clearer idea of the creative direction I want to follow, it will start to occur more naturally. Or maybe I just need to edit my thoughts more ruthlessly before expressing them.

Any tips, I’d love to hear them!