Short and Sweet?

Did you miss me?
I wasn’t here last week.
Actually I was here, but my words were not.
Actually they were, but there were too many of them.
Too many words.
It was a small paper, due to the holiday, and they didn’t have enough space for the long column I submitted.
I take full responsibility.
I admit freely that I went on a bit long, even for me.
That’s one of the more difficult aspects of writing a regular column – getting the number of words right.
It’s easy to come up with ideas, but hard to get those ideas to fit. Sometimes I have to coax them out of their shell. Sometimes I have to suck a few back into my mouth. Sometimes, though rarely, I get just the right amount.
I’m not complaining: I’m philosophizing.
I guess if I were a better writer I could get along with fewer words. Longer is not necessarily better.
Brevity, the saying goes, is the soul of wit, and I do so want to be witty. I think sometimes that when I am after wit, but go on too long, I end up with silly.
But perhaps wit without a sufficient number of words could be the definition of sarcasm.
Words are one of the few things that cannot be adequately assessed by quantity.
Most of what we desire in life is improved by quantity: money, love, gas mileage. It is not how many words however: it is which words, and how they are arranged, that matters.
There is a magic that occurs when what you want to say comes out the perfect length.
Not that I have ever created such magic, but I know what it looks like: I know it when I read it..
Saying something with just the right amount of words – no more and no less, might be the definition of poetry. Then again, poetry also requires the right words – but perhaps that goes without saying.
I think one of the reasons that there is so little poetry – or perhaps, so little appreciation of poetry these days, is that we have so much space to fill.
Poetry does not make good filler.
There are great long poems, but they were not created to take up space. There are great short poems, and they can fill a concert hall with their music.
But today we have a great deal more space – a great many more long, empty corridors to wander: a million recordings, ten million stations, a billion Internet pages.
Faced with these great, empty intellectual caverns, the inclination is to talk and talk and talk, without concern for spelling, grammar, and certainly not for brevity.
We chatter on and on, nervously: whistling ourselves passed the graveyard of the unspoken.
So it is difficult for all of us, particularly these days I believe, to think in terms of the right amount of words.
At least that’s my excuse.
I’ll try to do better next time.
497, 498, 499, 500!