The soul of wit

It turns out that blogging is helping develop my writing – who’d have thought it?

I noticed this while editing my ‘today’s inspiration’ post. I wanted to write succinctly, to keep the attention of blog readers looking for a quick hit of writing. So what started out as a throw-away but slightly rambling post got revised three times, each time making the language shorter, sharper, less cluttered, and reducing the word count. That’s how I like to write anyway, but this time I really got round to paring it down, and I liked the results.

And then I realised it’s what I’ve been doing, less consciously, on all my recent posts, and that they’ve made me better at it. So now I can take that back to my fiction writing. That writing gives me something to talk about here – now something’s feeding back the other way.