Incomplete

Why does everything I write feel incomplete? Every thought I express could be elaborated on, I could always dig deeper than I do. And when I do, when I actually pursue a thought further, I find myself running off on a tangent that takes me away from the topic at hand.

Elaboration and detail are useful and necessary. It’s no use if I only scratch the surface. With a blog, however, that seems almost inevitable. I would never finish a single article or, at the very least, they’d be way too long for anyone to be interested in them. Keep it simple. Keep it snappy.

Novel writing, or writing a non-fiction monograph if that’s your cup of tea, is for the detail and deep pursuit of one or more topics.

I find it difficult to stay on one topic. I deliberately try, though. I start on a thought I had, an idea that came to me, something that bothered me or that I feel passionate about. There are things I need to explain in order to make a particular point. Those things should be relevant to what I am getting at.

And then there is the conclusion. If I am lucky.

When I reread what I’ve written, I read mostly for consistency (yes, I do, believe it or not) and spelling or grammatical errors. Since I am German, my use of English may deviate from how a native English speaker might express themselves. Even when sharing a language, native or not, it’s not always easy to make myself understood, but I’ve very rarely been asked to clarify and in those cases it wasn’t my English, but the subject matter of which I understood more than the person I was writing to.

My style of writing and expressing myself is part of my voice and I am quite happy with that.

Going back to re-reading or even whilst writing something, I always want to inject another sentence or consider another thought. But then I need to ask myself, if it really is necessary and if it isn’t, I leave it out. I may take note of the thought for another time, which is how I may arrive at my next blog entry or one further down the road.

I suppose walking the thin red line was never supposed to be easy. Sticking to it can be so difficult sometimes, because one loses sight of it.

As a writer I occasionally feel as if I have ADHD, because I don’t just want to concentrate on one idea or thought, my brain feels compelled to follow a bunch of them at a time. That is very frustrating.

Clarity is paramount. I can’t just assume everyone is ready and willing to follow me through the maze of my thoughts. That said, however, I would do myself and my reader a disservice, if I were to dumb it down. It would be downright disrespectful.

No writer could ever aspire to attempt to reach everyone. We’re all too different for that to ever be an option. I suppose that’s why most writers stick to a certain genre, or invent one if needs must. That ensures they’ll reach the people, who read that genre, who are very likely the people, who will get them, their targeted audience.

See? Another tangent I ran off on and I can’t remember why. But I will leave it as is as a prime example.

You can’t ever finish telling a story. It will end eventually, but that doesn’t mean it’s finished. I can only hope to not leave too many loose ends hanging around once I reach the end of the story that I am trying to tell. Or come to some sort of conclusion in my blog, at least try and make a point to that opening thought I had.

I will, in all likelihood, rarely finish any piece of work in such a way that I won’t feel as if I’m not missing something or have left something out. I can only hope that it won’t be too important a piece. I should think no piece of writing could survive, if it did miss a major ingredient, though.

There. Now I can post this and wonder, what else I could have said.

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