I don’t write very well. Not that I’ve been trying to fool you into thinking that I do, but it has always been an impediment to keeping this blog current.
My infrequent posts hit home today when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and glanced at the new dashboard, which reported that I have:
- 34 posts, 5 pages, 14 drafts, contained within 22 categories and 0 tags.
Sometimes I spend hours trying to get a post to feel right, or just organize the words so that they make sense to someone other than myself. I have tried to ‘just write’ from time to time, but I end up editing, re-editing and occasionally removing posts altogether because I don’t like the way they read.
My friend Derek writes with apparent ease, sometimes multiple posts a day, and always very well written. As long as I have known him, he has been exceptionally well spoken and written, clearly evident in the fact that writes for a living. I remember years ago, working on his Apple IIc one night, we talked about writing. He said that he has a tendency to “over-comma”, something I am pretty sure I do a lot.
Some other issues I concern myself over:
- I rarely use contractions when I write. If you see any in my posts, it is likely because I have gone in and edited them to appear. This gives most of my writing a very formal, wooden tone.
- For some reason, I regularly use the same word twice in a sentence, or in two back to back sentences. I used the word “post” twice when writing about Derek’s work… until I edited it out.
- I tend to mix my tenses a lot. In one sentence I say “he is” and in the next, I’ll switch to “he had”.
- I try to compress my writing into short, sometimes terse, sentences. I don’t really know what that is – I usually want to get a lot of information out, but I find a hard time doing so. I think it comes from my high school days when I was constantly being corrected for having run-on sentences.
- Similar to the last point, I find it difficult to include an aside mid-sentence. That’s likely where my commas come in, but I have no idea how to use a sem-colon, a dash, an ellipsis to accurately denote my phrasing. Frankly, I just guess.
- I am supremely tangental in my thoughts, which is evident on any first draft of a post. I frequently have to move large amounts of text from one paragraph to another because they make little sense where they are originally. This leads to a similar problem previously noted: two sentences with a common word close together – leads to even further editing.
- In my head, my writing is awesome. This is likely my biggest problem. Mentally, I know what I want to say, but that’s because, being my space, I have a huge collection of ideas that make total sense to me. Organizing them into a sinlge written piece looks a lot less powerful on the page than it does in my brain. This leads to me being frustrated because I feel like I’m not able to convey my thoughts accurately, which results in a percetion that my writing sucks.
- I think I repeat myself, or add too many modifiers to describe something. The first modifier made my point, the second was unnecessary.
- I want my writing to be concise, but also interesting and full of the kind of detail that gives writing flavour. However, these ideas are at odds with one another in my mind, and I struggle to find a middle-ground that works. Frequently, I don’t find it.
These are some of the things rattling around in my head each time I try to put my thoughts into print. Perhaps I’ll take a crack at those 14 drafts.
My problem is that I frequently have no idea what I’m going to write about until I start writing. Most of my blog posts start with me commenting on something I’ve seen or heard, and end up with some pompous declaration of my personal philosophy on the subject in the final paragraph. But that “brilliant” closing insight was invisible to me at the beginning…
I edit my posts relentlessly, both while drafting them up and after publishing them. But the only thing that really makes your writing better is more of it.
And honestly, what you write on your blog is already so much better than the vast, vast majority of what other people publish on the web (have you looked at LiveJournal, or Twitter, or MySpace, or Facebook, or most Blogger or TypePad or WordPress.com blogs recently?) that I think you should just go with whatever you want to write about and maybe make the occasional fix-up later.
Also, I’ve had an informal policy for years at my blog to try to average one post a day. Not that I have to post once a day, but that I should try to average at that. And that each post contain at least one link. I don’t always adhere to those rules (they’re mine, after all), but they make a good guideline to keep me motivated.
I’ve managed to average closer to 1.1 posts per day over the past 8 years, which is cool, or dismaying, depending on how you look at it.
Hi Alistair
I just came across your website whilst looking at your Gaelic Lookup site, which I didn’t know about before tonight. It’s very interesting for me, as a translator, especially the fact that folk can inform you of other words that are in common usage, thus adding to your database.
Talking about blogs, I had one running for about five months at the beginning of the year, dealing with arthritis pain relief. I’ve stopped it at the moment because of difficulties with my webhost, but hope to get going again soon. I wrote on average two posts per week, but my big problem was (always has been) thinking of a topic to write about for a particular post. It probably sounds odd, but once I could resolve that problem, the actual writing seemed to flow effortlessly.
Hi Alistair, you really are struggling to write! It’s been over two months since your last post. Get on with it! Why can’t you be more like your friend Derek?
Cheerfully,
Alistair
I don’t have my own blog because I don’t have anything interesting to say.
Hey Bro,
I sometimes find myself writing, typically poetry or lyrics, and there are days where it flows out akin to liquid and still other days where it is similar to squeezing blood from a turnip. I don’t think one needs to write everyday. Instead I feel you should write when the words are ready to spill. I very rarely edit what I have written as I may change the original meaning. Granted I am not blogging in the same sense that you are.
Alex