This year (2024), I drove 1500+ miles round trip from London to the Isle of Skye. After returning from the seven-day journey, I had planned to capture every detail in a travel article. However, despite having tons of materials for it—probably too many materials—I couldn’t summarize the trip properly.
Fitting all the materials in one article made it boring, so eventually, I gave up. I blamed my writing skills for the failure, not realizing that the missing skill I needed was far simpler than I expected.
I had bitten more than I could chew by trying to write “about” the whole trip. I thought I could make even the mundane matters (eating at motorways, refueling from stations, and sleeping at slighly quirky hotels) interesting with my writing, but it was a lost cause all along. A good writer not only knows how to write, but they also know what to write on. Like journalists, they are able to discern the core of a story, and garnish that with mundane matters only when it elevates the highlight.
All I needed to do was think, and eliminate the clutters from my materials. The narrower the writing scope, the more unique it would be. The concept is similar to Atomic posts I write on my blog, and to Essentialism. I am surprised I didn’t see these connections before.
Instead of writing an article about my Scotland tour, if I had focused on the best parts of the trip, I would have felt less overwhelmed. Perhaps there is still time to salvage a story out of that drive. Let me give it another shot with reduced scope and see how it goes.