Challenges of writing a blog

Writing is almost always difficult for me. I read once that writing is nature’s way of showing you how muddled your thinking is. How true. The challenge of turning an idea, often a vague idea, into prose or poetry is intimidating. Another challenge is deciding what to write, what subject to capture in words, for whom or what to write, and even whether to write at all. The last point is the most difficult, at least when it comes to my blog.

I created my blog primarily as a place to share my ideas with others, as a motivation to write, and as a way to hone my ideas through the challenge of capturing them in words. I was not interested in publicizing it broadly, although I have sent the URL to friends and close acquaintances. As far as I can tell a few dozen people follow it, although few comment.

While I like writing and having somewhere to publish my work, even to a small audience, I increasingly have doubts about publishing on the internet. While I do not have too many reservations about the quality and content of my writing, I do wonder about adding my work to the flood of material flowing on the web—not just flowing like a stream or river but drowning us in a tidal wave that just keeps increasing in volume and intensity. As a result of being inundated in so much information we are suffering from a critical shortage of a basic necessity: attention. The landscape of the internet is too broad and complex that it is impossible even to be aware of much less understand what is available on any topic, and we lack the time to assimilate more than a tiny fraction of that.

Sure I want a blog, but more and more I wonder whether it is an act of futility and arrogance to add even a few drops to the flood of information drowning us and robbing us of our time and attention. I have been thinking lately that rather than a blog, I would like to have an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, the sort of device that was used to reproduce documents before computer printers and copy machines. Those of us who got our schooling before the late 60s recall those mimeographed pages with the blue-purple text and chemical odor. I fantasize about having a mimeograph machine so that I could use it to print the items I now post on my blog and then mail to my readers. Sure it would be more trouble, and there would be the cost of copying and postage to be borne in some way. But the result would be something palpable—something a reader could hold and read, something more substantial than pixels on a computer screen, something that would carry the connotation of being basic and unpretentious, something that would reflect the intentionality and care that I put into it.

Anyhow, having restarted my blog recently after a long gap during the worst of the pandemic, I am going to continue it—for now. I have things I want to say, not just to my readers but to myself. Since mimeograph machines are extinct and printing and mailing impractical anyhow, a blog is about the only place I can put my thoughts into words to share broadly. More importantly, as others have pointed out about their own work, I need to write about things in order to know how to think about them—I am my primary audience.