Not that you are counting my words, but when I set out write here on this blog project every weekday I told myself I had only one rule: keep it short and sweet.
I was going to try not to stray beyond 200 words in any given post.
If I couldn’t get the idea out in two hundred, maybe it wasn’t honed enough. Maybe I was babbling. Maybe it should have been something bigger than a blurb herein.
But the problem? Every post last week was well over two hundred, the last one creeping up to nearly 300 words.
Is that a bad thing?
Guardrails, even self-imposed ones can be important for the simple reason that creative restrictions often create a better product. In this particular case, volume was not my challenge. I know I can sit down any day and type-type-type out an essay-length post if I am so inclined. My challenge to myself and for the focus of this project was rather honing ideas to a sharp point, not muddling around in a big vat of chocolate-pudding-flavoured ideas.
What are your guardrails? Do you step over them? And does it ultimately, honestly, make the result better? Or not.
Terms FROm this POSt
- blog
- I admit, I am pretty old. And I started posting formatted words and photos online before the word blog had even entered the common lexicon. Most people work in the medium of social platforms these days, but being both a product of my time and a stickler for content ownership and control, I still lean into and promote the idea that a personal content managed general purpose website is the beating heart of the internet I once knew and loved. I use blogging software, but I don’t think of these sites like blogs, more like living documents that happen to look an awful lot like blogs.
