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| GROWTH STORY
Sunday, October 30, 2022
I wrote a short piece.
Well, it started that way, and as I got going, it seemed like a good idea to record how it went and how it grew and grew more.
It was about 250 words. It needed polishing and editing punctuation, and I worked on it with care to the point; within a few hours of revisiting it, walking away to something else, and after a little more work, I was able to cut it down to size ~ 800 words.
No, that isn’t a typo. Each time I tweaked that story, it grew again; it needed expansion to offer a required deeper understanding and better explanations. And better punctuation.
And it wore on, the story getting better in each iteration. I was patient, but at some point, I had to say, “Enough already!” It was 847 words.
But, since I’d made some changes, I needed to spell and grammar check again – and review the many punctuation tweaks required because of so many changes. A few changes and tweaks later, 963 words. And a dozen errors were yet to fix.
Finally, it was done.
And it was 981 words.
Many thanks to those who chimed in with kind words – it was a fun story to tell, a poignant memory and a lesson well learned.
This is a callback, for me, to a lesson from the late Nora Ephron, whose mantra was, ‘everything is copy,’ meaning that everything we encounter in life – foibles on any scale among friends, family, work, and play are things we should record in our memory or write them down, because we may want to use that tale one day to advance a story …
If you missed it, it was about eating cake – COMEDANT CRUTULAM (Latin for let them eat cake)
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