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i'll play along when i have a bit more time than i do at the moment.
but i'll offer a suggestion regarding your experiment--
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caveat: we do not have the same aesthetic, so keep that in mind no matter what i say, here or elsewhere, ok?
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aside: my journal is a kind of daily writing practice. that's how i look at it mostly--working on sentences as an end in itself, like practicing piano.
so one suggestion is to start a journal of your own, if you dont already do one.
if you make one here, folk could interact with what you're up to there as well as here.
and i dunno--while i certainly wouldnt hold anything i am doing up as a model, i can say that doing the daily or almost daily practice has had a huge impact on everything i write. especially on my academic writing--which for a long time i just hated.
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anyway:
i imposed a constraint on myself of eliminating all extra words.
in the journal i use line breaks to force myself back onto the sentences as if they are surfaces that i get to polish.
the flipside of doing that is that the constraint i impose on myself also imposes one on readers, who i think have to do a bunch of work to figure out what is going on.
while that doesn't bother me personally, it is a tradeoff.
but unless you are considering publishing a piece, i am not sure that you have to worry about that. and even then, you have choices.
to your experiment: i think you explain too much.
the desire to explain seems to cause you to go beyond metaphor construction and into what--in my view--is telling your reader how they are supposed to react. it's like you are pushing the reader around. like you arent sure that you want to give the reader space to make your story as *a version* of what you intend--you seem to want to transmit your intent directly so that the reader reacts as you do.
it may be that what you need to develop is more confidence in your skills--which are considerable--so that you can allow readers more space to make the language jump and do things for themselves.
if my experience is any guide, that'll enable you to do less. that's a start anyway. the rest is practice.
the above is obviously general, but i think it points to something that runs throughout.
believe in what you are doing more so that you feel like you have to say less.
if you want to fill stuff in, be expansive, then do it because it has an effect that you think desirable for itself--this is different from defaulting into explanation.
and its ok to make readers do work, i think.
of course, not everyone agrees with that.
as a population, my experience of the tfp readership is that it seems to prefer that the writing do alot of work for them.
but that's a separate matter from how you might think about what you write.
and in the end, that perference is their collective choice (or problem, depending on how you see things).
keep going tho. ignore everything else i say if it doesnt resonate, but keep going.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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