100 WORDS FOR MARCH

If your the art of poetry mentor asks you to write the same piece about writing twice, using twenty-five words in one version and an even hundred in the second, would you write the big one first, then cut it back for the second try? Or would you write the small one first, then expand it to meet the big hundred-word requirement? Certainly you could make it work either way, but I choose to write the big one first because it seems to offer more spontaneous optionality. We’ll see how that works out. Interesting exercise in verbal economics.