I got a lot out of this year‘s Portland Book Festival, although big sales were not a part of it. A most important and relevant takeaway for me to apply to my current Work in Progress was one shared by my friend Adam. “Be expansive in your writing.” I have an index card with that phrase next to my computer as an important reminder, along with two other nuggets I scribbled during a Festival author panel. All three are important reminders for me applicable to this next work of mine. I’ll withhold details about any specifics, as who knows how long the drafting and finalizing phases take. Besides, I started it over two years ago, before dropping it to instead write From First Breath to Last. It’s hard to know where else my brain might head in the meantime. I will say, though, while I’ve never participated in NanoWriMo, I am celebrating adding 30,000 words to my WIP during November. (Another biscuit?)

I’ve been grateful, as a writer, to not yet exhaust the content that circles my brain. I’ve shared before how it is more common than not while out on a walk, to pause, turn on my phone’s note app, and dictate a few sentences, paragraphs or once in awhile a couple of pages. Freeing the words swirling in my brain. Later I dump it into the computer, knowing massaging and reworking will change them up, but keeping those oxygen enhanced nuggets. Still, it is becoming a bit more common that I dump a blog idea as I try to be more protective of the quality of my content. I often now stop myself before furthering a blog or post and ask myself: will anyone really care? Frankly, it’s not about creating viral content as I suspect that will never happen for me. But if it’s something to resonate with a few? Good enough, I say now.

Yet, let’s talk length. Blogging is easy – as long as the posts are neither too long or too short? Bingo. On the other hand, all four (five if you count my self-published “blog to book”) of my books are on the shorter side. And though I’m proud of myself for publishing them, part of me now, a better writer than I was back when I began, wonders if I might have taken longer? Might I have not hurried through my story, found more backstory or detail? Or does that change the kind of writer I am – for good or not? Who knows and I am not so worried about that, regarding those books I’ve completed.

However, as I undertake my current novel, I am challenging myself to write more expansively. In thinking this through, I understand how my lifetime writing journey has included a quest to be concise. (Not always in my day to day communication, my daughters might say.) This may not have been the case in my dozens of volumes of personal journals where I might have written on and on, only limited by free hours in the day. Which can be significant with school, full-time job, raising kids, helping aging parents and all those other things that come along in life’s journey.

But in my prior professional settings it’s been critical for me to be concise in my explanations. Even for those infrequent professional journal articles I’ve contributed to, although sometimes they may feel repetitive or as if they go and on, they don’t really. Leading up a science-based blog at OHSU for over a decade, I strived for clarity and brevity, as I do with this blog. To be concise so to “keep your audience.” I’m certain I was reminded of the “Cut the Crap” journalism tenet. Although I first heard “CTC” in an Introduction to Journalism class at Lincoln High (thanks Dave Bailey), I too recognized it in my Dad’s writing, and that of other journalist family members. I knew I wanted my words to be clear and crisp. Nothing excess. Gratefully, I was and still am a big fiction reader. And today, I’m paying even more attention to the expansion of story in what I read.

How do we expand our writing without becoming repetitive or boring? Better writers than me remind us: show, don’t tell. Create a picture, share the senses and what our characters are noticing or feeling. I remind myself to add more detail. More nuance. To venture off with specific examples. Above all, I tell myself not to be in a hurry. I have always been a “doer” and efficient in getting things done: I need to remind myself to be more of a “meanderer.” Hey, I like that. Maybe I’ll add that to an index card.

And what about finding that time? Not just time to write, but to not be in a hurry, to write expansively? With my other books I was busy! Full time job, all but one while helping my aging mother. Always so much to do. Although at the time, my June 2024 layoff was devastating and surprising, I look back now in gratefulness. I know now how stressed and dissatisfied I was. Yes, I inherited less stress and more time. Throughout so much of our working lives it is often hard to find both those things. And I recognize being someone now with this privilege of time. Time to establish an amazing relationship with my not so wee anymore grandchild. I have time to wonder and take my time. I have time to be expansive. To not be in such a hurry. To, as they say, smell those roses. Yes, to meander.

What about you? What are your best tips for writing expansively?