It’s easy to turn short writing into fanciful long form. A lot of books can be written in 100 fewer pages. A lot of speeches can be cut by 5, 10, 20 minutes. A lot of podcasts can say what they are saying in a five-minute personal video than a 50 minute scripted podcast.
That being said, it’s still easy to turn short writing into pretty, short writing. I call it glamorous writing, but what it needs to be is gumptive writing; writing that’s honest, transparent, and human. It gets the point of the emotional labor needing to be done and shows that you’re in whatever you’re writing about for the long run.
Glamorous long form: Through innovate endeavors we can seek and conquer the path of least resistance that winds us into a less competitive market allowing us to facilitate well-thought-out marketing strategies that will rope in the plurality of the masses and satisfy our unwavering desire for a consistently increasing profit, which in turn we can build bigger facilities and add to our paid advertising budget.
Glamorous short form: We’ll market to a niche group, increase profits and grow our company.
The long form is pretty, isn’t it? Full of buzz words, passive voice, and a lot of empty promises. As for the short form, it’s quick and to the point, almost like a bullet point on a slide with too many other bullet points. But what about the Gumptive form?
Gumptive form: We’ve found the people seeking the solution we offer and know they have friends sharing the same problem. By adding some design and marketing to this tribe, we can leverage the power of word-of-mouth because we’ve shown we care and we know the tribe is full of influencers. With profits, we can hire additional designers to increase the remarkability of our solution thus always giving people something new to talk to others about.
It’s a bit longer than the glamorous long form, but it’s more honest, transparent, and full of care. You can tell they meant every word they wrote and would be happy to talk about any part of it in depth. As for the glamorous writing, ask the writer of it any question regarding what they wrote and they’ll, well, either choke or give you another glamorous non-answer.
The reality is we don’t need to find artful ways to say very little or artful ways to say a lot. We don’t need to thesaurus every second word and overuse the rule of three. We need to be definitive about our passions and how they can benefit others on an emotional level, on a human level.
By being real we become trusted and by becoming trusted we can do work that matters for people who care about doing work that matters. And in the end, it’s really about the forwardness of intentions for all parties. As ol’ Zig said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
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