Time for a Change?

On April 21st of 2020, I published my first blog post — a piece titled Discovery of the Random, about finding good books. I look back on it and like it just fine. I like a lot of the stuff I write, but probably because I’m the only one who understands what I mean half the time. I’ve written about that too — the desire to be understood.

By the end of June that year, I decided to chuck the social media and focus on writing a blog post a day for a year. And I made it. And I kept going. Until August 8th, 2021, when I just plain forgot. Still, it was quite a run. And I picked it up again until just last month, when, on a particularly long and arduous day, I made a conscious decision not to even bother mailing it in with a weak post.

And it didn’t bother me at all.

Still, something else is starting to get to me. A few times I’ve started writing about something on my mind, thinking I’d publish it for the day, only to remember that I’d written about almost exactly the same thing not a few months before. And when I go back and look at some of my earlier stuff, I see something good in it, but not as much more recently. When I look back at the stats, for the first few months I did more than one a day (not by much — maybe on one day a month I’d write two posts). In July of 2020 — my first full month — I wrote 42 posts. I guess my mind was fresher. I certainly didn’t have to wrack my brains for subject matter.

But now it’s getting to be like a bad game of Wordle. I’ve got a couple of letters in place, but all of the words I can think of with those letters in those places include letters that I’ve already used earlier.

I’ve been thinking lately. My commitment to daily content has really worked against me. One of the major driving factors in writing this blog was to develop my style. To practice regularly and diligently. To get better at it. And I have in some respects. But I’ve hit a wall. The deep work of writing can’t be done in daily snippets. I mean, it’s a start to get those ideas out there and flowing, but it leaves them weak and underdeveloped. I’ve had a couple of days where I’ve really gone to town — racking up a couple thousand words in an hour or two. But a couple thousand words needs more attention than I can give before the midnight deadline. A thousand is more like it. Gives me time to let it sit, give it a reread a couple of hours later, then a good edit. So I’m sure if I dug around on my computer, I’d find some long pieces that never got finished. Those are the days when I felt it better to just slap something together at 8 PM and maybe get to the long piece again tomorrow.

Yet it seldom worked out that way. Usually the next day I got busy with something and by the time I got back to the writing, my brain couldn’t think clearly enough to do the piece justice. And I know there are quite a few pieces I was working on where time ran out, so I cut them off before they were really done. Maybe these couple of years have helped me learn a bit to work on a deadline, but daily might just be too much.

So I’ve given it some thought, and I’m seriously considering a good, solid, weekly piece (or two if I’m so inclined) rather than the daily. It’s time to take the next step — to go deeper instead of wider. Quality over quantity. And, to tell you the truth, the past two years have provided a treasure-trove of ideas. Things on which I only made light work due to the time constraints, but that maybe I could rework in a better way. It kind of reminds me of the portfolio I had to present for my MA, a portion of which was dedicated to rewriting work that I’d done early in my degree, along with an explanation as to why I made any changes. Something to show I’d grown and developed in the field. This could be something along the same lines.

So it’s time to break out my favorite book on writing, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and think this through. Gotta figure out a good time to start, if I do at all.

Until then, here’s a little related yacht rock.