On Short versus Long Writing

Short writing should be polished.

Long writing should not be.

Poems, aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, sonnets, briefs, one-liners all benefit from compression. They are meant to spur their entropy-loaded counterpart; conversation.

Books, essays, plays, papers, documents and memoirs are decompressed expansions. They should have redundancies, idiosyncrasies, nuance and informalities.

People should call your short writing beautiful, poignant, eloquent, captivating, enchanting, resonant, haunting.

People should call your long writing unpretentious, colloquial, common, abrupt, offensive, rugged, opinionated and controversial.

Nobody ever got pissed off at a poem. But meet the poet for a drink and you’ll uncover where it all came from.

There is a time to distill and a time to go off.