Brevity Redux (the long version)

I hate when I finish a blog entry and get a couple comments and then realize what I didn’t mention, what I didn’t say and I am tempted to go back in my comments only that would really prove my long-windedness, no?

The disc jockey Raven was interviewed by before Ignite called the event “Attention Deficit Theater” and I noticed that line has been picked up, and what’s funny about that is that when Raven started to use Twitter I thought it was “Attention Deficit Blogging.” But I’ve since realized that it isn’t, any more than Haiku is “Attention Deficit Poetry.” What it is the theater, the communicating, the poetry of the essential.

Which brings me back to my current preoccupation with Twitter, and how for all of the technical difficulties the service has, I marvel at what it is, what it is like, and how it isn’t like other things I have experinced. I guess my initial misconceptions about Twitter were that one, it would be this solipsistic exercise, a yammering of different voices all clamoring exclusively about what each user was doing, and so I was surprised to see the connecting going on. Secondly and shamefully, I thought that if it could be expressed in 140 characters then it must not be worthy of expression. So wrong. Finally, I thought that if you reduced you would find the limiting produced homogeneity. Wouldn’t all of our two word memoirs be “Birth Death” or at three words, “Work Consume Die”? And instead it seems like the limits serve to free people from the unnecessary, that making every character count can make people very thoughtful. I don’t need to point out how this is analogous to the Ignite event do I?

So maybe what I was wondering yesterday with my first Brevity post (which I kept mercifully short actually instead of going through all of my random associations with What Brevity Means to Me) is if using Twitter could in the long run make me a better writer. Not that I would want it to be my only means of expressing myself. It feels like bowing exercises I do with my violinist and violist and cellist, we spend hours doing silly things to learn to control the bow, the speed and weight, things that don’t sound like music at all, doing races setting the bow at the tip, then the frog, then the tip, or splatters where we drop it on and let it bounce. And it’s useful, but not the only way we would want to practice. What is my point, six words?

Brevity has its place, but in moderation. It can get silly. In addition to my NPR podcast I listened to the NY Times Book Review podcast which mentioned a contest for ‘Pollanisms’ — in honor of Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables,” the winning entry, by A.K., “Ate plants. A whole heap. Still hungry.”

Getting things into 140 characters is useful, but sometimes what I love to read circles around a point, or sets up an elaborate metaphor, weaves a motif in gently throughout a piece, lets the point come out gently and relief, lets you find it for yourself in a magic eye sort of out of focus meditation, which is hardly the journalistic clarity, the direct point made I do admire in other writing.

And this is what I was trying to find my way to saying on the phone today with a friend who thinks she is ready to start blogging, that there is no right way to do it, that there are endless degrees of editedness and spontaneity, of disclosure and concealment, of brevity and digression, and that there is almost a homeostatic, biological balance point you have to find where it serves you, or you will be unable to sustain your blog. It is MY blog, and I do experiment some, trying to find the place where it works best for me.