Some thoughts on the 300 word limit

The founder of this blog wrote a couple of days ago that Nicheless had found a couple of niches of its own as follows:

"(1) Content creators who use it to publish content outside their niche.

(2) Other creative people who use it as a low pressure environment to publish their thoughts."

There's perhaps a third niche - people whose creativity has been compromised by years of writing for narrow, formal audiences, and are looking to see if there is any life left in their creative muscle.

I'd been looking to write on issues that I don't cover as a lawyer and policy person but couldn't figure out what form this should take.

Ironically, for someone seeking to lose my constraints, that of readers with specific expectations of what and how I wrote, what attracted me immediately to Nicheless was a different type of constraint: the 300 word limit. (And its minimalist look.)

I found that this gave me an approachable but not too soft a target. 300 words are sufficient to string a few thoughts together without having to go too deep and backing everything up with research, as I have to do for the other stuff I write. At the same time, I have to think carefully about my text - rambling isn't an option.

Amit Varma often points out how the internet has unshackled writers from the constraints imposed by the 800 word op-ed, the 100,000 word book and other formal writing conventions. He's right. The ability to experiment with form (and the absence of gatekeepers) has given an outlet to many creative folks.

To this proto-writer however, taking the first tentative steps into writing outside my niche, it's the constraint that has been liberating.

Let's see where this goes.