Simplify

“…I read your blog thing,” he said.  “It was really long and full of long words.  How do you even think of things to write about?  It doesn’t seem to be about anything.”  Ian (his real name) is one of my very best friends and his views are to be taken seriously.  He will admit that on the odd occasion that he reads what I have written he doesn’t always ‘get’ it, but, I wonder, if he doesn’t, why should anybody else?  Do I go on too long?  Am I overly verbose?  Do I make too little sense?  Of course I do.  It is exactly what I do and the only way I can think of ensuring that I don’t do it is to stop writing altogether.  I don’t want to do that, so I think that the effort to change the way I do it probably ought to start today.

The main problem is that I write as I speak and I speak as I think.  You might find it difficult to believe – and I certainly wouldn’t blame you – but I do write this thing well in advance and I do take my time over it.  I write a lot and consequently I have a stash of unpublished posts at my disposal in preparation for fallow times.  I have just read some of them and now I think that I probably need a lie down.  They’re not all overblown nonsense full of self-obsessed twaddle, but many of them are and the worst offenders, beyond doubt, are those about blogging.  Ask anyone to write a post about ‘the hardships’ of whatever it is they do and you are undoubtedly going to end up with a self-pitying litany for your troubles.  I am as guilty as the next person – even if that happens to be Karl Ove Knausgaard*.

I have a plan.  I have given myself a talking to.  There will be no more self-analysis – well, at least not as much.  That horse has already been flogged to death – an idiom I hear all the time, but one that I have only just realised is thoroughly unpleasant.  I have excised it from my lexicon of phrases which, being a child of the sixties, is growing shorter by the day.  Nevertheless, like an OCD bowel, I try to move with the times.  Short and to the point (compendiously epigrammatic) is now my middle name.  In the future I will tell you only about what I have done, what misfortune has befallen me, what I have made up, what I have just discovered (that I should have known for a lifetime), but definitely not about the contents of my brain and how I strive to make a blog out of it.  Nobody needs to know what’s going on up there.

I am aware though, that shorter isn’t always an option for me.  Things tend to fill the space they need.  Some short stories, for instance, require more time whilst certain very specific whinges require much less.  Back in the day, when people paid me for doing this, I always wrote to a thousand words and whilst the majority of my posts today are a little shorter than that, deliberately shortening them doesn’t seem to be my thing: I love a good adjective.  More to the point?  I’m not sure, particularly as I don’t always have one.  ‘A’ is my general departure point and ‘Z’ my final destination, but in between the two, all bets are off.

As for long words… I really do write as I speak so perhaps that explains why I have so few friends.  I’ve always loved words: antidisestablishmentarianism was held in such reverence in my childhood that I don’t even have to think about the spelling.  My mum was very keen on the difference between “Can I?” and “May I?” – a small peccadillo, but one that still makes my ears tingle at the thought of getting it wrong.  My dad was a builder, so his vocabulary often veered towards the four-letter, but the correctness of his expletive-usage was exemplary.  And words evolve anyway.  ‘Correct’ does not mean what it meant thirty years ago, ten years ago even.  It now means ‘inoffensive to absolutely everyone’, in a decade’s time it will mean bland, disinteresting and devoid of all humour.  Perhaps it already does…

Anyway, too long, too complicated, too high-falutin’… I will try to correct them all.  The effort, as I have mentioned, starts today, the results will be yours to digest in perpetuity – or for a day or two, whichever comes first…

*Look him up – I did…