If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter

I have a dozen half-baked ideas marinating in my drafts but I read this quote yesterday and it has invited me to sit with it for a while. Wouldn’t it be impolite if I refused? Thank you.

The internet tells me that variations of this quote can be (mis)attributed to either Blaise Pascal, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson, and Mark Twain or all of them.

But the point is — writing succinctly is hard.

My appalling idea-to-word ratio may suggest otherwise but page counts, character limits, and editing margins have been on my mind lately as I have been tasked with writing concisely for academic purposes.

It is frustrating how much time my internal scales take to stabilize — when I weigh the completeness of an idea against concision.

This is not something new. History has been witness to my trade-offs between brevity and nuance and it has never worked out. Partly because idk I just like the flow and rhythm of words. (Is this short enough for you, Pascal?)

A friend of mine once said that long-winded onslaughts are about the writer screaming “Listen to me and look at what I know” while optimal pieces respect the reader.

15 y/o me who used to lap up 1000-page novels argued that it is a rather reductive view of the craft.

A retiree living in a small coastal town, with children who have moved away and a partner lost to time, needs the words in his paperback to decorate time, as much as the words need him to breathe meaning into their existence.

But again, isn’t reducing writing to its words also a reductive view?

Something to think about. Currently though, writing riddled with caveats is proving to be a challenge — one that pushes my limits by imposing new ones.

Having said that — If I *actually* had more time, I would written nothing.

Until, next time.