Write with Reduced Scope

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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.

Nobody can write a book or an article “about” something. Tolstoy couldn’t write a book about war and peace, or Melville a book about whaling. They made certain reductive decisions about time and place and about individual characters in that time and place — one man pursuing one whale. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.

~ On Writing Well.

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.

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