All Killer, No Filler
2025-12-17
I've been thinking more about how easy it is for me to become too distractible and procrastinate on writing. Writing itself is such a cognitively "expensive" task, and while it is rewarding to do it, many of us still contend with the fact that there are times where it's so hard that it becomes miserable. This is especially the case when it becomes more difficult to formulate sentences for whatever reason. That lack of flow makes writing an even more painful task.
When inspiration strikes and the muses benevolently give me an immense amount of energy and flow, writing incites intellectual ecstasy. Unfortunately, though, these periods are rather infrequent and unpredictable. With writing as a vocation, one of the most important skills to develop is being able to write when there's no inspiration or flow—a more common situation.
Getting out words feels like it's an absolute slog. I'll laboriously type away at something and in the midst of trying to maintain a voice and style that satisfies me, I grow tired very quickly. I look at my word count: barely even 100 words. Holy shit, there is fucking nothing coming out of my head. I have nothing to say. There's a greater trend in writing that I've seen as well. Writers will go on and on and harp about the same point for thousands of words. They will take something that could have been communicated in 500 words and make it a 3000-word mental jungle gym that no one wants to climb through. Long-winded writing disgusts me. I think it takes true talent to be terse, but still dense in substance.
That's why I feel more gravitated to shorter writing, especially these days. There are so many published books that don't need to be 300 pages. Hell, for a lot of nonfiction titles there are even services that exist to provide summaries of these texts because we all know that it is absolutely unnecessary to be reading all that shit. Of course, there is an importance in letting a piece breathe and having every moment and progression forward feel earned. There is a lot of harm in bouncing between too many things too quickly. It's jarring to a reader and is always spastic and uncomfortably manic. Even still, I find myself more comfortable in shorter form writing.
Honestly, I think it takes more effort and talent to write things like short stories or essays than something like a novel or whatever nonfiction is trending on the New York Times bestseller list. That's because there is a significant challenge in taking the emotional impact one would get from a novel and doing that same thing in a tenth of the words. That restriction, to me, cuts out all the fat. All killer, no filler—not a word or comma wasted. That's the good stuff. I'll also concede and say that a great advantage of longer form works, especially when done right, make it so that readers don't want to close the book or leave the world the writer creates. I've read plenty of solid page-turners and those are always an absolute pleasure. If I could write something like that for someone one day, that would bring me immense joy.
Still, I've always been obsessive with making my prose as stylistically distinct as I can. If my rhetoric isn't airtight, I don't want to write it. The details are everything for me. Without the details, the work falls apart. This has become a major obstacle in its own right too, as I've discussed many times before. Being obsessive over details makes the most friction between my thoughts and my fingers. My greatest strength inevitably becomes my greatest weakness. My work here is an effort to compensate for it. That's why I show up with these entries, try to keep room in the tank to work on longer works, and tell the inner critic to take the back seat.
Every day is a lesson and an opportunity. All I have to do is show up.