Your Blog Posts Don’t Always Need To Be That Long, Okay?

You fire up your laptop. ‘I better get this down before it leaves me,’ you think. An excruciatingly long 7 second loading screen finally reveals a new draft page, and now it’s time for the magic to happen.

“Boom, baby,” you say, out loud.

Your fingers touch the keyboard, caress it for .3 seconds, then immediately start pounding away at every letter key in existence.

“Damn, this is going to be a great one,” you think.

50 words turns into 100 words, which turns into 150 words, and in a matter of 10 minutes you’re already 200 words in.

‘This might be the best blog post I’ve ever written,’ you think.

Your excitement brings you to the 400-word mark, and like a master painter looking back at his creation, you sit and sip your coffee in pride.

Then disaster strikes.

‘Sh*t,’ you realize. ‘I’m done already.’

Like a train suddenly reaching the end of the tracks, you sit there in disappointment, realizing that’s all you really wanted to say in the first place.

Now there’s nowhere to go.

If this has happened to you, don’t worry. I have a two-word solution:

Publish it.

“But it’s too short!” you scream.

No, publish it. Here’s why.

Why Do We Equate Good Writing With Long Writing?

We are we so apprehensive to publish something so short? I know I am. Why am I like that?

Good writing does not equate with longer writing.

When I read “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White five years ago, one of the first lessons they taught was this:

“Omit needless words!”

One of the first lessons in the greatest writing book of all time was to actually make your writing shorter.

I see it all the time, too. Students of mine — bless their souls — and writers submitting work to my publication can carry on and on about stuff nobody really cares about.

Get to the point. If you’re a beginning writer, my best advice would be to actually cut out 50% of the words you write in every blog post. That’ll teach you more about good writing than any writing course on the internet.

We Should Value Shorter Writing More

Every day, Seth Godin publishes something on his world-famous blog. His posts are almost always less than 150 words in length, and a few days ago he published a post that didn’t even get above 70 words.

Short-form blog posts are what he’s known for.

In a world where Google, Medium, and the internet at large prefer longer-form blog posts over shorter, how could something like Seth Godin’s blog do that well?

Because our attention spans are shorter than ever. I have a theory that if you wrote shorter blog posts, people would actually thank you for it and gravitate towards your writing more, since you get to the point quickly and they can now go about their day.

Good writing isn’t about using 100 beautiful words to prove a point.

It’s using 10 words instead of 100, or even 1,000. This isn’t a college book report where you need to hit word counts and stuff your writing with useless garbage.

Don’t do that.

Strive to say in 5 words what you originally said in 50. When you can do that, then you’ll hit a different level.

Hemingway’s Six Word Story

The legend goes that one day at lunch with a few writers, Hemingway bet all of them $10 he could write a novel in six words. In today’s valuation, that’s about $130.

Seeing easy money, the writers took him up on the bet, and shortly after Hemingway scribbled these six words on a napkin.

“For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.”

The story isn’t true. Hemingway never wrote those words and many say these words actually appeared in a newspaper in the for sale section.

Nevertheless, the fact that so many people believed he actually wrote that proves the point..

Entire stories can be told in six words. Keep this in your mind when you write your latest “short” blog post, and don’t be afraid to publish away when you get to the end in a hurry.