Relevance

As a writer there is a fine balance you have to strike between rambling, and relevance.  When you are trying to write something, whatever it is, there is inevitably an objective you wish to a achieve.  Whether it be to tell a story, or present a point of view, or deliver a message, or simply to share an observation and your interpretation of that observation, the objective is often the easiest thing to define.  The heavy lifting comes when you actually try to achieve that objective.  While writer's block can be seen as the inability to write anything, to even start the process, on the opposite end of the spectrum, rambling can be just as much of a threat to a writer.

I just wrote and scrapped a post that was 500 words long reflecting on the blogs I have deleted over the years and the audiences I had attempted to target with them.  In writing the post however I got side tracked and went off on a tangent about marketing and defining a niche.  I scrapped the post in the end because the content was inconsistent and amounted to a random collection of thoughts rather than having a clear message.  Consistency is key and without it you're really just talking to yourself and writing down what you have to say.  They say when we write great narratives we live out conversations between people in our heads, and that might be true, but if it is, then most people probably wouldn't be interested in the mundane conversations those voices share, would they?

When you read works of fiction, one thing that you inevitably come across is dialogue between characters.  When you read that dialogue however and break it down by how much is said and how long is spent saying it there is a question that arises for some, while others simply make an assumption as to the answer and give it no further thought - "Is that all they said?" - by this I mean, when reading a book with dialogue, or even when watching a TV show and seeing characters interact, do you ever stop and wonder what the characters say to each other beyond what is written, or do you assume every single thing they say to one another is written down?

If someone was to novelise your life, which conversations would they document in the story, and which conversations would they discard?  How accurate would the depiction of your character be with the omission of certain conversations?  Have you ever had a conversation that changed your life?  Or one that would go on to shape the character of the person you are today?  Which interactions would you consider worthy of note, and how do you determine that?

As my English teacher once said to me, you can spend fifteen pages describing the intricate details of a flower but if it's not important to the story it's a waste of time for you and for the reader.  There is a balance to be found between setting a scene, and going into excessive detail when it is not needed.  Rambling by extension is the bane of a writer's existence because it is the exploration in detail of thoughts and ideas that aren't relevant to the message you are trying to convey.  Which brings us back to the message of this post, in drawing a line between rambling and relevance, how do you determine what is relevant to your life and your character?  Would you be the same person you are today if any given conversation was omitted from your past?