/pen/ - A Place to Create and Critique★

By all means, save it into a word document. These long posts are provoked by a natural response in you to something, and the ideas that flow from you are, as is understandable, pure and natural. You are not sitting down and putting forward something contrived, you are not pulling intellectual straws in order to find some motivation to write something: it is precisely when you are goaded into writing a long post you are conscious of the fact that there is a character limit. You therefore have to restrict the grandeur of your reply, and you have to summarize a horde of thoughts into three or so paragraphs that fit this character limit. You have perhaps even become quite skilled at doing this: you have found yourself able to write stirring posts, utilizing just the correct image, just the correct formatting, with just the right message, and you have been quite pleased with yourself, having received positive replies from people who have enjoyed it.

But you are actually castrating yourself in a way that is destructive. Consider not abandoning the post after submitting it on one of the boards, but instead save it into a word document and, girded by your natural fervor to respond to whatever had provoked you, turn this post into an essay, a treatise, even a story.

So many of you actually do have very much to write about and say. It is not this that is troublesome, but it is solely unlocking your potential. Your potential must be unlocked through nature: trying to force a story when you have not been naturally inspired will lead to a decidedly unnatural tale that will likely be stilted and not live up to what you know you are capable of.

I propose therefore that you utilize your posts here as inspiration. You have no doubt become quite good at writing posts on the internet, and I am suggesting that you can turn these into longer works.