I’m not verbose.
It’s probably my one great tragedy, aside from having a flat singing voice. I just cannot expound about something, no matter how hard I try. Eventually it becomes dull and I get bored, as I often got bored as a child reading the classics. I simply do not need a page and a half description for a ray of sunlight, no matter how beautiful it is. Also, I simply cannot write a page and a half about a ray of sunlight.
As a person, I am almost never jealous, but two writers I know are really flaring this emotion in me at the moment. One is doing a thirty-day writing challenge and nailing it. Another drops 9,000 words a day into her memoir. Both are, through no fault of their own, killing my soul.
I think this may be why I have always gravitated to poetry. Most of my poems are less than 50 lines, and I do believe that’s enough space to describe that ray of sunlight perfectly. Then I think about my past, writing plays. I did maybe six or seven, and three got produced in some form. These were decidedly longer pieces, ranging from a short children’s play to a three-act opus for my high school love. I love writing plays, but I have been out of theater for a while and honestly haven’t had the inspiration to write one. What I really want, the gold ring of writing, for me, is a novel.
I started four and finished none, because I am not verbose enough. I get halfway through my tale and realize I don’t have nearly enough for half a book and way too much for half a short story. My max output is 4000 words in a sitting. My max sitting for my novel is twice a week. It’s just not enough. I need three or four days after just to gather enough details to sit down and pen what I’m trying to say again. Sometimes I get frustrated because I can see it so clearly in my mind, but on the paper it sounds terrible. Dialogue is tricky, because I am very good at that bit, but sometimes my writing relies on it too heavily and I have to go back and describe that ray of sunlight and then everything falls apart.
I wish I could sit at the keyboard and pound out pages and pages of words. Good or bad, it doesn’t really matter because the editing process is a whole other thing. My blog remains the one place where I do get wordy on occasion. Here I am updating two days in a row. Why? Because I need to increase my output. I need to keep myself writing even if I can’t sit down and work on my book at the moment. I’ve got a novel that needs thousands more words, a poem that only needs maybe fifty, and a blog that has no expectations of me save a Monday deadline that I impose on myself. I’m stuck elsewhere, so I come here.
I am not verbose. I cannot pen pages about a ray of sunlight. But I can drop a couple hundred in my blog and feel good about myself. So here we are.
Ham 'N Eggs 