Today, we are concrete. Today we are looking at writing and writing well. Today we are examining DigiKev and we see what this marvelous man can tell us about our writing.

I quickly came home for lunch yesterday to leave a beautiful bouquet of flowers for my wife to find when she got home. I also took the time to make some Ichiban Noodles. They take three minutes to cook. Anything that can be done in three minutes or less is always a good thing, right?

I am certainly a child of the microwave age. I want everything pre-packaged, pre-cooked and ready to go—in three minutes or less. If we could only get to the point where whole meals could be swallowed by a pill. Or maybe we could just inject it. The new drug. Delicious, quick and almost painless. Though everyone who is scared of needles would have a tough time, but—for the sake of efficiency—I am sure you would bare it.

I hope we can agree that we don’t really want that. I hope you don’t. At least, not beyond a novelty. We might live life like that from time-to-time or fairly regularly, but I would rather eat a big, juicy apple and sit under a tree while enjoying a bird’s song. There is certainly a push in the blogging world to say things quick, efficiently and entirely swallowable—no chewing required. Lee forwarded me one of Seth Godin’s posts a couple of weeks ago. It was everything that is efficient:

Don’t let the words get in the way. If you’re writing online, forget everything you were tortured by in high school English class. You’re not trying to win any awards or get an A. You’re just trying to be real, to make a point, to write something worth reading. (Seth Godin, January 26, 2008)

As I sat and swallowed my three minute noodles everything came together (I suppose it could be argued that three minute noodles are good for epiphanies). I don’t need to just say it. If I did that—for this post—I would say: Be more creative with your writing, use a fragmented style but don’t actually shrink the length of your content. There you go. You now do not have to read any further. I hope you do.

If you ever have to pick between 1 or 2, for the sake of all that is holy and profane in this world, pick 3. I know what Seth is saying. Some people know how to talk. That’s fine. It’s just the ones that now how to talk without saying anything is the problem. We know that the internet is full of people who are microwave children. I am one. However, we are easily tricked by fragmentation. We are tricked by continually shifting and heading in different directions—as long as you continue to head towards your goal.

Kevin is using fragmentation to his benefit. He doesn’t force his content into a pill or blend it up. He does, however, use fragmentation to his advantage. He gives us short bursts of information, as if it were a whole-wheat-bread-crumb trail and we are starving for the good stuff. The stuff that fills. He uses excerpts from comments and emails to create a dialogue and—more importantly—a story that reveals that all important third option. Revealing a balance between polar options. And if you look carefully, and pay attention to how sly he is, the conversation gets longer and longer. He gives a taste to begin with and then starts leaving bigger chunks and I ate it up.

Try using conversation to fragment the content to give short three minute bursts. Or look at what I did. I just wrote some six hundred words and it likely took you more than three minutes, but—if I did my job right—then you didn’t notice. If you did, than I just have more to learn. You don’t need to squish, blend or pulverize your content to have your reader enticed. Just cut it into bite-sized pieces.

Photo by Paul Downey