A problem I often run into when writing (as an absolute amateur, anyway) is that there’s too much I want to explore, and the scopes of my blog posts tend to become bigger and bigger with unsettling speed. I often find myself adding sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections, and repeating myself throughout them until I become lost in a rambling draft that touches on a million points but doesn’t fully address any of them, or else overreaches in the connections it attempts to make between disparate ideas.
So how do you know when to stop adding to a post?
I think the best thing to do is for each post that’s getting out of hand is to divide it into multiple posts (that will comprise an ongoing series) and publish them one at a time. This lets you iterate on your previous ideas while still publishing consistently, and will keep your thoughts brief and absorbable.
There’s something really valuable about only discussing one part of an idea at a time, because each part of an idea is still a whole idea itself, so why shouldn’t it get its own space to be explored?
Anyway, I’m working on a series of responses to Kelsey’s post and follow-up about load-bearing aspects and behaviors, and ran into this problem, and the best way forward seems to be to break it down into atomic components, as small as possible while still retaining hopefully useful or original thoughts.
A Thousand Roads 