Too many words?

Too many words.

How many words can anyone stand?

Today I was forcing myself to continue developing an online course in report writing for a local community college. Writing an online course involves writing a script for what one would say in class; but whereas in class one can speak from notes, a form of prepared improvisation, online one has to write everything down. And write accurately, clearly, because questions will be harder to answer. More work. Far more work. And not interesting work. To be sure, search techniques, evaluating sources, structuring an argument, documenting sources—these are all important. But they have been written about before. Why write about them again? And why am I still, after all these years, forcing myself to write what I don’t want to write?

The last time I posted here, it was an account of my experience as a doctoral candidate. Part of that experience was wrestling myself down every day I wrote another paragraph, another page, of a dissertation that didn’t matter to me. Leaving the academic world and turning to tech writing because in computers was the future, I found myself once again forcing myself to write what I didn’t care about. Worse, the writing had to be anodyne, without pitch or rhythm, without any of the juice that makes writing fun to read and interesting to do. Leaving the academic world, I had promised myself, “Never again,” and flipped into photography school as a way of keeping that promise.

Now, 25 years later, I’m writing what I don’t want to write, teaching writing—a necessary, even valuable, task I don’t want to do.

Looking for distraction, I visited a new favorite blog, Detectives beyond Borders, and found a link to a new blog International Crime Authors Reality Check by four international crimewriters—two of whose books I have read with real pleasure—and from there to Words without Borders an online magazine of international writing. All good stuff—too much good stuff to read. And too many words. How do these people do it—write novels, write blogs? Do they like writing?

Yesterday looking for a better income, I revisited the websites of some coaches of business writing. They all say the same things, the same things I teach, the same things written about in the flannelly prose of the textbooks I have used. Too many words.

What matters to me about language—its precision, its power, its sound—doesn’t get mentioned. Serious writers know about these qualities of language, or did; some business writers use them. But do they matter in prose that’s here today, gone tomorrow? Do they matter to people whose culture is popular culture, or to academics who consider comic books texts on a level with Shakespeare? Do they matter online?

Even now I contribute yet more words. Too many words.