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Too Many Words

Is it possible to write too much?  I remember asking a famous scholar once about something he had written.  He couldn’t remember it.  In his defense he said, “You know, you write so much.”

I’m not a young man, and I think I’m finally starting to see what he meant.  In addition to this blog, I write another under my actual name.  I’ve been doing for about six years.  The other day I recalled a somewhat funny thing I’d written (or so it seemed to me) but I couldn’t find it.



I tried searching the blog with every possible keyword I could imagine.  Nothing helped.  I couldn’t remember what I was writing about, or even the exact wording of the phrase.  It was a powerful image, though, and I wanted to find it.  Even in these days of “lasers in the jungle” you can’t find a phrase when you need to.

Maybe the problem is I write too much.  I write every day.  I pretty much have since I was a teenager.  My advice to younger writers is always the same: write every day.  Even if it’s only for fifteen minutes.  It is the daily practice that you need.

On a rare day off work I can write thousands of words a day.  Most days it’s only about a hundred or two.  Still, the important thing is to do it.  Like a musician, or a farmer, a writer can’t take a day off.

My ideal vacation, should I ever get to choose, would be an isolated cabin with reams of paper and buckets of pens.  I’d like to spend an isolated week with my own thoughts.  Or a month.  Or a year.

We writers live in our own heads. I need other people, of course.  Without them there’s not much to write about.  Still, I need that time to spend alone with my ideas.


Maybe, however, I indulge myself too much.  I have folders, discs, and cloud space full of words and I can’t even find the ones I wrote for a particular occasion.  All I can say is that this will be a mess to sort through when I’m gone.

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