Without the topic of school to provide a throughline or readymade theme for the blog – which was the reason for its birth, after all – the content of my posts has scattered itself across self-help, tech, and cultural themes, though there has been silliness too. Mustn’t forget silliness.
I tend to find the longform deepdish essays more satisfying to write; they also sometimes require longer gestation periods or hours of intense focus. I always enjoyed Montaigne’s brief essays in his first book and that served as a sort of model when I started blogging in the mid-aughts. Although it is telling that his longer essays in Book 3 tend to be both the most conversational and the ones I and others enjoy re-reading the most.
I start a post with the intent to keep it brief, but I too often fall in love with the sound of my writing voice, and – as if I were having a conversation with myself – think about this or that idea which simply must be mentioned. I need to curb that tendency though; in technical writing, the worst thing you can do is to dump every thing you know into the documentation. It shows a lack of discrimination in understanding what to include and what to leave out. This makes the reader’s experience less pleasant and their job even harder.
For the longform essays, I try to follow the advice of academic writing coaches and start a post by writing a key sentence for each paragraph. When I see the thread of the argument, I can thicken the blessay with more detail and supporting evidence. Having decided what I will include, I am more likely to stay on track and let go of ideas or witticisms that don’t fit.
I try to. More often, I simply start typing and ramble away, generating huge rafts of text that need to be considered, pruned, tossed out, refined, etc. Whichever method I use depends on my mood, time, energy, and so on. I am consistent in my inconstancy.
I find that writing about my personal systems for organization or productivity or techie stuff are usually fun and easy to write. They can be long, though. When I write about things that are a little more personal and ruminative — such as my information packrat nature or what I find inspiring and why — I touch more chords with my reader(s). In the end, I write about whatever I want to spend time thinking about and playing with. I find that I’m not reading as much as I used to , but I’m writing more, and I think that’s a fair tradeoff.
One of my goals for the blog reboot was to burn through a lot of ideas that had piled up during the years when I was not blogging regularly. Then, after I’d gone through those, my plan was to see what was left for me to write about. But as I predicted in my first post, the more I write, the more I find to write about. I do sometimes raid the old list, but I as often pluck new ideas to think about as well.
Of course, the real topic of a personal blog is me, my life, my interests, and my exploration of my thoughts. And journaling the process of “learning as I go.” These posts are cups drawn from a well that, so far, thankfully, seems bottomless.
