I have blogged since before I knew what it was. Even before that I started keeping journals (something I do to this day). Somewhere between a great upheaval in my personal life in 2005 and advances in my career that sapped my time and energy, I lost the love of blogging, and even writing.
I have been pondering retiring my blog for now, and just leaving a placeholder with how to contact me, and some relevant personal information. Before I do so, I’d really like to give it one last attempt. One of my major problems is that I continually self-censor thinking it won’t interest people, or they will dislike my opinion. Also, I feel inept at writing in the humorous, and witty style I desire. These blocks are personal, and most likely stem from self-esteem issues in general and as such I should not submit, but fight the urge to just quit.
In essence, I would like to try a seven day experiment wherein I blog whatever I want as it comes to me. I will blog every day from noon Sunday, January 10, 2009 to noon on Sunday, January 17, 2010.
How can you help? I would love it if, during this time, you could comment with your impressions, feedback, questions, thoughts, criticisms, suggestions and the like whenever possible. Even if you don’t normally comment on blogs (like myself), it would mean a lot if you could this week. This will allow me to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and will also help me overcome the feeling that it doesn’t matter if I write or not and that people care. Even if you drop me a note to say I completely missed the mark, or that you disagree with what I said, etc. All of it will be helpful and much appreciated. Do so anonymously if you feel better, but please do.
I’ll report on Sunday and decide where to go from there. Thank you so much. A special thanks to the dwindling group of readers from Poeticgeek who’ve stuck around all these years to see if I’d really ever get back on the horse properly. I really appreciate it.
Tags: 7 Comments
1) Write what you want to write about and don’t worry about what other people think. *really*
2) Style; practice, practice, practice.
Of course, I’m one to speak – I haven’t posted anything since September.
Thanks for the quick response WTL. Definitely one of my biggest problems is being particularly concerned with what people might think, what they might be interested in, etc. I definitely need to just go ahead and write what I want. There was a time I talked about the mathematics behind energy capacitance simulation models (including extensive LaTeX and annotations) for a solid week. I don’t know where I lost my “voice.”
As for style, I also think you’re bang on. It’s easier to write well when you are writing a lot. If you barely write at all (save >140 character tweets) then you get out of the habit and quality suffers.
You should get back on the bandwagon too. I like both your style and your content and would love to see more.
Writing is easy – you just stare at the blank blog post box until beads of blood form on your forehead. I do it all the time.
Knowing your love of [toys] Sorry! Make that “sophisticated electronic devices”, should you just be limiting yourself to writing? There are also mini-interviews, photos, video snippits and ‘hey guys I just found a site where you can learn to make a gadgemawidget – here’s mine’ type of posts.
Just my $.02. Now back to that blog post . . .
Wendy.
Thanks for the comment. I have been meaning to write a thorough review of that gadgetmawidget. =D You gave a bunch of great tips. I recently delved into photography and could write about my adventures (or misadventures) with that.
Getting started is definitely the problem for me. I really had something I wanted to say about the Facebook group of Canadians against proroguing parliament, but I stared at a blank post for about twenty minutes before initiating the first of several false starts and ending with me scrapping it entirely. If only writing came as easily to me as talking.
Good luck with your experiment! I’ll check back :-)
what I’ve found, though, is writing what interests me has caused everything else to follow.
This is a good idea.
Any writing is better than no writing.
Why do you feel you should not submit to the urge to write motivated by self-esteem issues? Is it a valid therapy? If so, then you owe it to yourself to continue.
Self-censorship is a huge sticking-point for writers. Kerouac railed against it; Ginsberg was mired in it.
It is a poor creative mind that ever looks at its work and says to itself that it’s great. The trick is to present it as great anyway.
Keep on truckin’, Gord.
[...] the end of the seven day experiment, it seems that I will keep blogging, albeit at around 3-5 posts per week. This kind of low volume [...]